Page "Jean-François de La Harpe" Paragraph 7

Eventually La Harpe was compelled to resign from the Mercure, which he had edited from 1770.

On the stage he produced Les Barmecides ( 1778 ), Philoctete, Jeanne de Naples ( 1781 ), Les Brames ( 1783 ), Coriolan ( 1784 ), Virginie ( 1786 ).

In 1786, he began delivering a course of literature at the newly-established Lycée.

In these lectures, published as the Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne, La Harpe is considered to have been at his best, finding a standpoint more or less independent of contemporary polemics.

He is said to have been inexact in dealing with the ancients and that he had only a superficial knowledge of the Middle Ages, but he was excellent in his analysis of seventeenth-century writers.

Before the rise of Racine, Sainte-Beuve found La Harpe to the best critic of the French school of tragedy.