n which struck out an untried path of its own, from the time
Moliere had not yet acquired his art to the glorious days when he gave his
country a Plautus in his farce, a Terence in his composition, and a
Menander in his moral truths. But the difficulties overcome, and the
disappointments incurred, his modesty and his confidence, and, what was
not less extraordinary, his own domestic life in perpetual conflict with
his character, open a more strange career, in some respects, than has
happened to most others of the high order of his genius.

It was long the fate of Moliere to experience that restless importunity of
genius which feeds on itself, till it discovers the pabulum it seeks.
Moliere not only suffered that tormenting impulse, but it was accompanied
by the unhappiness of a mistaken direction. And this has been the lot of
some who for many years have thus been lost to themselves and to the
public.

A man born among the obscure class of the people, thrown among the
itinerant companies of actors--for France had not yet a theatre--occupied
to his last hours by too devoted a management of his own dramatic corps;
himself, too, an original actor in the characters by himself created; with
no better models of composition than the Italian farces _all' improvista_,
and whose fantastic gaiety he, to the last, loved too well; becomes the
personal favourite of the most magnificent monarch, and the intimate of
the most refined circles. Thoughtful observer of these new scenes and new
personages, he sports with the affected _precieuses_ and the flattering
_marquises_ as with the _naive_ ridiculousness of the _bourgeois,_ and the
wild pride and egotism of the _parvenus_; and with more profound designs
and a hardier hand unmasks the impostures of false _pretenders_ in all
professions. His scenes, such was their verity, seem but the reflections
of his reminiscences. His fertile facility when touching on transient
follies; his wide comprehension, and his moralising vein, in his more
elevated comedy, display, in this painter of man, the poet and the
philosopher, and, above all, the great moral satirist. Moliere has shown
that the most successful reformer of the manners of a people is a great
comic poet.

The youth _Pocquelin_--this was his family name--was designed by the
_tapissier_, his father, to be the heir of the hereditary honours of an
ancient standing, which had maintained the Pocquelins through four
or five generations by the