Count Philippe-Paul de SÉGUR (1780-1873) General, Peer of Fr - Lot 533

Count Philippe-Paul de SÉGUR (1780-1873) General, Peer of France and historian, member of the Académie française. - Autograph letter signed May 6, 1838, addressed to playwright Casimir BONJOUR, 46 rue St Honoré, Paris. 3 pages in-8°: "I would like to thank you a thousand times over, Sir, for the letter you sent me and for the kind letter you enclosed. The luminous glimpse you cast upon the dramatic art of the earliest times sheds light on this fertile era. It's impossible to say more and better, in fewer words, and to be more Attic when speaking of Athens. Indeed, this city was the literary capital of all Greece. Your judgment seems to me to be even more profound and extensive on modern theater. The genius of common sense, which is the first of geniuses, has inspired you and shown you the effects and causes of our decadence. A few strokes of your pen have sufficed, and in a language of concision, full and at the same time elegant, ornate and picturesque, you give us the spirit of the past and present history of our theater, and unfortunately also to its future history. However, you tell me that man is nothing and men are everything. But Sir, although there is a great deal of appropriateness in all glories. Perhaps you don't give enough credit to the genius that places him at the head of the spirits of his age, and even accelerates and directs their movement. Sicily undoubtedly inspired him, but he did not present the great path of this coming century until it was heard. If God existed, ... he made him speak a divine language.... I renew my thanks for the beautiful and so judicious page of history that you have kindly sent me..."