its
purpose. It failed like all the others; did more, perhaps, than any
other to bind Ireland to the Catholic Church, and to alienate Irishmen
from the English rule. On the Irish race it has left undying memories
and a legend of tyranny which is summed up in the peasants' saying of
the "Curse of Cromwell."

Cromwell, not worse than the Puritans and English of his age, but nobler
and more just, must yet for generations to come bear the weight of the
legendary "curse." He was the incarnation of Puritan passion, the
instrument of English ambition; the official authority by whom the whole
work was carried out, the one man ultimately responsible for the rest;
and it is thus that on him lies chiefly the weight of this secular
national quarrel.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] James Butler, first Duke of Ormonde, was now head of the Irish
Royalists.--ED.

MOLIERE CREATES MODERN COMEDY

A.D. 1659

HENRI VAN LAUN

The seventeenth century was the period of a very remarkable
literary outburst in France, an outburst which has done much to
mould French genius of more recent times. The latter part of
the century, which has been called the Augustan age of France,
the age of Louis XIV, has certainly been but seldom equalled in
the number and variety of the writers who adorned it. Yet it
owes much of its brilliancy, much of its rapid development, to
the training of the decades previous to 1650, and especially to
the enthusiastic patronage of that great statesman Richelieu.
Were a Frenchman seeking for a single event, a single date to
mark the most striking moment of this literary era, he would
probably select the foundation of the French Academy by
Richelieu, in 1635. Or perhaps he might turn to the production
of Corneille's most famous tragedy, _Le Cid_, in 1633. Neither
of these events, however, has quite what we would recognize as
a world-wide significance. The Academy has done much for
France, but it has always remained a French academy, and the
forty "immortal" Frenchmen who constitute its membership have
not always owed their election solely to literary eminence.
Neither have Corneille's tragedies been accepted as models by
the world at large.

But under Corneille's influence the French stage developed from
a state of buffoonery and wooden imitation of the ancients to a
state where a greater artist than Corn