[Footnote A:  Aubrey has noted this habit of our two greatest dramatists, when speaking of Shakspeare he says—­“The humour of the constable in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he happened to take at Grendon in Bucks; which is the roade from London to Stratford; and there was living that constable in 1642, when I first came to Oxon.  Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of men dayly, wherever they came.”  Shadwell, whose best plays were produced in the reign of Charles II., was a professed imitator of the style of Jonson; and so closely described the manners of his day that he was frequently accused of direct personalities, and obliged to alter one of his plays, The Humorists, to avoid an outcry raised against him.  Sir Walter Scott has recorded, in the Preface to his “Fortunes of Nigel,” the obligation he was under to Shadwell’s comedy, The Squire of Alsatia, for the vivid description it enabled him to give of the lawless denizens of the old Sanctuary of Whitefriars.—­ED.]

But however tastes and modes of thinking may be inconstant, and customs and manners alter, at bottom the groundwork is Nature’s, in every production of comic genius.  A creative genius, guided by an unerring instinct, though he draws after the contemporary models of society, will retain his pre-eminence beyond his own age and his own nation; what was temporary and local disappears, but what appertains to universal nature endures.  The scholar dwells on the grotesque pleasantries of the sarcastic Aristophanes, though the Athenian manners, and his exotic personages, have long vanished.

MOLIERE was a creator in the art of comedy; and although his personages were the contemporaries of Louis the Fourteenth, and his manners, in the critical acceptation of the term, local and temporary, yet his admirable genius opened that secret path of Nature, which is so rarely found among the great names of the most literary nations.  CERVANTES remains single in Spain; in England SHAKSPEARE is a consecrated name; and centuries may pass away before the French people shall witness another MOLIERE.

The history of this comic poet is the tale of powerful genius creating itself amidst the most adverse elements.  We have the progress of that self-education which struck out an untried path of its own, from the time Moliere had not yet acquired his art to the glorious days when he gave his country a Plautus in his farce, a Terence in his composition, and a Menander in his moral truths.  But the difficulties overcome, and the disappointments incurred, his modesty and his confidence, and, what was not less extraordinary, his own domestic life in perpetual conflict with his character, open a more strange career, in some respects, than has happened to most others of the high order of his genius.

It was long the fate of Moliere to experience that restless importunity of genius which feeds on itself, till it discovers the pabulum it seeks.  Moliere not only suffered that tormenting impulse, but it was accompanied by the unhappiness of a mistaken direction.  And this has been the lot of some who for many years have thus been lost to themselves and to the public.