rass. "We must now,"
said this sensible pedant (in a remote allusion to the fate of idolatry
and the introduction of Christianity) to the poetical pedant, Chapelain,
"follow the counsel which St. Remi gave to Clovis--we must burn all that
we adored, and adore what we have burned." The success of the comedy was
universal; the company doubled their prices; the country gentry flocked to
witness the marvellous novelty, which far exposed that false taste, that
romance-impertinence, and that sickly affectation which had long disturbed
the quiet of families. Cervantes had not struck more adroitly at Spanish
rodomontade.

At this universal reception of the _Precieuses Ridicules_, Moliere, it is
said, exclaimed--"I need no longer study Plautus and Terence, nor poach in
the fragments of Menander; I have only to study the world." It may be
doubtful whether the great comic satirist at that moment caught the sudden
revelation of his genius, as he did subsequently in his _Tartuffe_, his
_Misanthrope_, his _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, and others. The _Precieuses
Ridicules_ was the germ of his more elaborate _Femmes Savantes_, which was
not produced till after an interval of twelve years.

Moliere returned to his old favourite _canevas_, or plots of Italian
farces and novels, and Spanish comedies, which, being always at hand,
furnished comedies of intrigue. _L'Ecole des Maris_ is an inimitable model
of this class.

But comedies which derive their chief interest from the ingenious
mechanism of their plots, however poignant the delight of the artifice
of the _denouement_, are somewhat like an epigram, once known, the
brilliant point is blunted by repetition. This is not the fate of those
representations of men's actions, passions, and manners, in the more
enlarged sphere of human nature, where an eternal interest is excited, and
will charm on the tenth repetition.

No! Moliere had not yet discovered his true genius; he was not yet
emancipated from his old seductions. A rival company was reputed to have
the better actors for tragedy, and Moliere resolved to compose an heroic
drama on the passion of jealousy--a favourite one on which he was
incessantly ruminating. _Don Garcie de Navarre, ou Le Prince Jaloux_, the
hero personated by himself, terminated by the hisses of the audience.

The fall of the _Prince Jaloux_ was nearly fatal to the tender reputation
of the poet and the actor. The world became critical: the marquises,
and the precieu