a frank and noble spirit’s sublime invective against the frivolity, perfidious and showy semblances of court.  “This misanthrope’s despitefulness against bad verses was copied from me; Moliere himself confessed as much to me many a time,” wrote Boileau one day.  The indignation of Alceste is deeper and more universal than that of Boileau against bad poets; he is disgusted with the court and the world because he is honest, virtuous, and sincere, and sees corruption triumphant around him; he is wroth to feel the effects of it in his life, and almost in his own soul.  He is a victim to the eternal struggle between good and evil without the strength and the unquenchable hope of Christianity.  The Misanthrope is a shriek of despair uttered by virtue, excited and almost distraught at the defeat she forebodes.  The Tartuffe was a new effort in the same direction, and bolder in that it attacked religious hypocrisy, and seemed to aim its blows even at religion itself.  Moliere was a long time working at it; the first acts had been played in 1664, at court, under the title of l’Hypocrite, at the same time as la Princesse d’Elide.  “The king,” says the account of the entertainment in the Gazette de Loret, “saw so much analogy of form between those whom true devotion sets in the way of heaven and those whom an empty ostentation of good deeds does not hinder from committing bad, that his extreme delicacy in respect of religious matters could with difficulty brook this resemblance of vice to virtue; and though there might be no doubt of the author’s good intentions, he prohibited the playing of this comedy before the public until it should be quite finished and examined by persons qualified to judge of it, so as not to let advantage be taken of it by others less capable of just discernment in the matter.”  Though played once publicly, in 1667, under the title of l’Imposteur, the piece did not appear definitively on the stage until 1669, having undoubtedly excited more scandal by interdiction than it would have done by representation.  The king’s good sense and judgment at last prevailed over the terrors of the truly devout and the resentment of hypocrites.  He had just seen an impious piece of buffoonery played.  “I should very much like to know,” said he to the Prince of Conde, who stood up for Moliere, an old fellow-student of his brother’s, the Prince of Conti’s, “why people who are so greatly scandalized at Moliere’s comedy say nothing about Scaramouche?” “The reason of that,” answered the prince, “is, that Scaramouche makes fun of heaven and religion, about which those gentry do not care, and that Moliere makes fun of their own selves, which they cannot brook.”  The prince might have added that all the blows in Tartuffe, a masterpiece of shrewdness, force, and fearless and deep wrath, struck home at hypocrisy.