master-work of Racine, vexation and wounded pride had done their office in the poet’s soul.  Pious sentiments ever smouldering in his heart, the horror felt for the theatre by Port-Royal, and penitence for the sins he had been guilty of against his friends there, revived within him; and Racine gave up profane poetry forever.  “The applause I have met with has often flattered me a great deal,” said he at a later period to his son, “but the smallest critical censure, bad as it may have been, always caused me more of vexation than all the praises had given me of pleasure.”  Racine wanted to turn Carthusian; his confessor dissuaded him, and his friends induced him to marry.  Madame Racine was an excellent person, modest and devout, who never went to the theatre, and scarcely knew her husband’s plays by name; she brought him some fortune.  The king had given the great poet a pension, and Colbert had appointed him to the treasury (tresorier) at Moulins.  Louis XIV., moreover, granted frequent donations to men of letters.  Racine received from him nearly fifty thousand livres; he was appointed historiographer to the king.  Boileau received the same title; the latter was not married, but Racine before long had seven children.  “Why did not I turn Carthusian!” he would sometimes exclaim in the disquietude of his paternal affection when his children were ill.  He devoted his life to them with pious solicitude, constantly occupied with their welfare, their good education, and the salvation of their souls.  Several of his daughters became nuns.  He feared above everything to see his eldest son devote himself to poetry, dreading for him the dangers he considered he himself had run.  “As for your epigram, I wish you had not written it,” he wrote to him; “independently of its being commonplace, I cannot too earnestly recommend you not to let yourself give way to the temptation of writing French verses which would serve no purpose but to distract your mind; above all, you should not write against anybody.”  This son, the object of so much care, to whom his father wrote such modest, grave, paternal, and sagacious letters, never wrote verses, lived in retirement, and died young without ever having married.  Little Louis, or Lionval, Racine’s last child, was the only one who ever dreamt of being a writer.  “You must be very bold,” said Boileau to him, “to dare write verses with the name you bear!  It is not that I consider it impossible for you to become capable some day of writing good ones, but I mistrust what is without precedent, and never, since the world was world, has there been seen a great poet son of a great poet.”  Louis Racine never was a great poet, in spite of the fine verses which are to be met with in his poems la Religion and la Grace.  His Memoires of his father, written for his son, describe Racine in all the simple charm of his domestic life.  “He would leave all to come and see us,” writes Louis Racine;