A man born among the obscure class of the people, thrown among the itinerant companies of actors—­for France had not yet a theatre—­occupied to his last hours by too devoted a management of his own dramatic corps; himself, too, an original actor in the characters by himself created; with no better models of composition than the Italian farces all’ improvista, and whose fantastic gaiety he, to the last, loved too well; becomes the personal favourite of the most magnificent monarch, and the intimate of the most refined circles.  Thoughtful observer of these new scenes and new personages, he sports with the affected precieuses and the flattering marquises as with the naive ridiculousness of the bourgeois, and the wild pride and egotism of the parvenus; and with more profound designs and a hardier hand unmasks the impostures of false pretenders in all professions.  His scenes, such was their verity, seem but the reflections of his reminiscences.  His fertile facility when touching on transient follies; his wide comprehension, and his moralising vein, in his more elevated comedy, display, in this painter of man, the poet and the philosopher, and, above all, the great moral satirist.  Moliere has shown that the most successful reformer of the manners of a people is a great comic poet.

The youth Pocquelin—­this was his family name—­was designed by the tapissier, his father, to be the heir of the hereditary honours of an ancient standing, which had maintained the Pocquelins through four or five generations by the articles of a furnishing upholsterer.  His grandfather was a haunter of the small theatres of that day, and the boy often accompanied this venerable critic of the family to his favourite recreations.  The actors were usually more excellent than their pieces; some had carried the mimetic art to the perfection of eloquent gesticulation.  In these loose scenes of inartificial and burlesque pieces was the genius of Moliere cradled and nursed.  The changeful scenes of the Theatre de Bourgogne deeply busied the boy’s imagination, to the great detriment of the tapisserie of all the Pocquelins.

The father groaned, the grandfather clapped, the boy remonstrated till, at fourteen years of age, he was consigned, as “un mauvais sujet” (so his father qualified him), to a college of the Jesuits at Paris, where the author of the “Tartuffe” passed five years, studying—­for the bar!

Philosophy and logic were waters which he deeply drank; and sprinklings of his college studies often pointed the satire of his more finished comedies.  To ridicule false learning and false taste one must be intimate with the true.

On his return to the metropolis the old humour broke out at the representation of the inimitable Scaramouch of the Italian theatre.  The irresistible passion drove him from his law studies, and cast young Pocquelin among a company of amateur actors, whose fame soon enabled them not to play gratuitously.  Pocquelin was the manager and the modeller, for under his studious eye this company were induced to imitate Nature with the simplicity the poet himself wrote.