Who can doubt the value to the bearing, the fine address, the literary culture of a youth of either sex that might come from the careful study and the attempt to render adequately a fine conception of some golden writer of our golden age, earnestly made, if only partially successful?

I say only partially successful, but can you doubt the capacity of our young people to render in a creditable way the conceptions of a great poet?  Let us look at the precedents again.  When Mademoiselle de Caylus, in her account of St. Cyr, speaks of the representation of Andromaque, she writes, “It was only too well done.”  And prim Madame de Maintenon wrote to Racine:  “Our young girls have played it so well they shall play it no more”; begging him to write some moral or historic poem.  Hence came the beautiful masterpiece Esther, to which the young ladies seem to have done the fullest justice, for listen to the testimony.  The brilliant Madame de Lafayette wrote:  “There was no one, great or small, that did not want to go, and this mere drama of a convent became the most serious affair of the court.”  That the admiration was not merely feigned because it was the fashion, here is the testimony of a woman of the finest taste, Madame de Sevigne, given in her intimate letters to her daughter, who, in these confidences, spared no one who deserved criticism: 

The king and all the Court are charmed with Esther.  The prince has wept over it.  I cannot tell you how delightful the piece is.  There is so perfect a relation between the music, the verses, the songs, and the personages, that one seeks nothing more.  The airs set to the words have a beauty which cannot be borne without tears, and according to one’s taste is the measure of approbation given to the piece.  The king addressed me and said, “Madame, I am sure you have been pleased.”  I, without being astonished, answered, “Sire, I am charmed.  What I feel is beyond words.”  The king said to me, “Racine has much genius.”  I said to him, “Sire, he has much, but in truth these young girls have much too; they enter into the subject as if they had done nothing else.”  “Ah! as to that,” said he, “it is true.”  And then his Majesty went away and left me the object of envy.

Racine himself says in the Preface to Esther: 

The young ladies have declaimed and sung this work with so much modesty and piety, it has not been possible to keep it shut up in the secrecy of the institution; so that a diversion of young people has become a subject of interest for all the Court;

and what is still more speaking, he wrote at once the Athalie, “la chef d’oeuvre de la poesie francaise,” in the judgment of the French critics, to be rendered by the some young tyros.  When, in 1556, in Christ Church Hall, Palamon and Arcite was finished, outspoken Queen Bess, with her frank eyes full of pleasure, declared “that Palamon must have been in love indeed.  Arcite was a right martial knight, having a swart and manly countenance, yet like a Venus clad in armour.”  To the son of the dean of Christ Church, the boy of fourteen, who played Emilie in the dress of a princess, her compliment was still higher.  It was a present of eight guineas,—­for the penurious sovereign, perhaps, the most emphatic expression of approval possible.