erous, have lent his hand to the composition of
romantic comedy. He certainly inspired that fine genius.

Politically it is accounted a misfortune for France that her nobles
thronged to the Court of Louis Quatorze. It was a boon to the comic poet.
He had that lively quicksilver world of the animalcule passions, the huge
pretensions, the placid absurdities, under his eyes in full activity;
vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers,
extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians, sonneteering
marquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded maids, inter-threading as
in a loom, noisy as at a fair. A simply bourgeois circle will not furnish
it, for the middle class must have the brilliant, flippant, independent
upper for a spur and a pattern; otherwise it is likely to be inwardly
dull as well as outwardly correct. Yet, though the King was benevolent
toward Moliere, it is not to the French Court that we are indebted for
his unrivalled studies of mankind in society. For the amusement of the
Court the ballets and farces were written, which are dearer to the rabble
upper, as to the rabble lower, class than intellectual comedy. The French
bourgeoisie of Paris were sufficiently quick-witted and enlightened by
education to welcome great works like Le Tartuffe, Les Femmes Savantes,
and Le Misanthrope, works that were perilous ventures on the popular
intelligence, big vessels to launch on streams running to shallows. The
Tartuffe hove into view as an enemy's vessel; it offended, not Dieu mais
les devots, as the Prince de Conde explained the cabal raised against it
to the King.

The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance of the uses of comedy in
teaching the world to understand what ails it. The farce of the
Precieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon made
popular by certain famous novels. The comedy of the Femmes Savantes
exposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic absurdity of an
excessive purism in grammar and diction, and the tendency to be idiotic
in precision. The French had felt the burden of this new nonsense; but
they had to see the comedy several times before they were consoled in
their suffering by seeing the cause of it exposed.

The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly received. Moliere thought it dead.
'I cannot improve on it, and assuredly never shall,' he said. It is one
of the French titles to honour that this quintessential comedy of the
opposition o