giving advice full of sense and taste on the manner of reciting his verses, never breaking their harmony by a vulgar diction, nor hurting the sense by a wrong emphasis.  What a charm must the verses where Esther recounts the history of her triumph over her rivals have had in the mouth of Mademoiselle de Veillanne, the prettiest and most graceful of the pupils of St. Cyr!  How grand he must have been, when, with that noble figure which Louis XIV. admired, he taught Mademoiselle de Glapion, whose voice went to the heart, to declaim the beautiful verses of the part of Mordecai!

The genius of Racine glows finely in Esther. In the choruses, the inspirations of the Hebrew prophets, framed as it were in a Greek mould, give impressive relief to the dialogue, as in Sophocles and Aeschylus.  It was played several times, and no favour was more envied at the Court than an invitation to the representations.  The literature of the time has many allusions to them.  The splendid world, in all its lace and powder, crowded to the quiet convent.  The great soldiers, the wits, the beautiful women were all there.  The king and Madame de Maintenon sat in stiff dignity in the foreground.  The appliances were worthy of the magnificent Court.  In Oriental attire of silk sweeping to their feet, set off with pearl and gold, the loveliest girls of France declaimed and sang the sonorous verse.  It is really one of the most innocent and charming pictures that has come down to us of this age, when so much was hollow, pompous, and cruel.

Hamlet says to Polonius, “My lord, you played once in the university, you say.”  To which Polonius replies, “That I did, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.  I did enact Julius Caesar.  I was killed in the Capitol.”  Do not suppose, Fastidiosus, that the playing of Polonius was any such light affair as you and I used to be concerned in up in the fourth story of “Stoughton,” when we were members of the Hasty Pudding.  In the Middle Ages, in convents and churches, flourished the mysteries; but, says Warton, in the History of English Poetry, as learning increased, the practice of acting plays went over to the schools and universities.  Before the sixteenth century we may find traces of dramatic vitality among the great English seminaries; but if the supposition of Huber, in his account of English universities, is correct, the real founder of the college drama in England was a character no less dignified than its founder in Germany.  Erasmus, as he sits enthroned in a scholar’s chair in the market-place at Rotterdam, the buildings about leaning on their insecure foundations out of the perpendicular, and the market-women, with their apple-bloom complexions, crowding around him, shows a somewhat withered face and figure, less genial than the handsome Heidelberg professor as he stands at Worms.  But it was Erasmus, probably, who, among many other things he did while in England, lent an important impulse to the acting of plays by students.