Into this elevated and artificial circle of society our youthful and unsophisticated poet was now thrown, with a mind not vitiated by any prepossessions of false taste, studious of nature and alive to the ridiculous.  But how was the comic genius to strike at the follies of his illustrious friends—­to strike, but not to wound?  A provincial poet and actor to enter hostilely into the sacred precincts of these Exclusives?  Tormented by his genius Moliere produced Les Precieuses Ridicules, but admirably parried, in his preface, any application to them, by averring that it was aimed at their imitators—­their spurious mimics in the country.  The Precieuses Ridicules was acted in the presence of the assembled Hotel de Rambouillet with immense applause.  A central voice from the pit, anticipating the host of enemies and the fame of the reformer of comedy, exclaimed, “Take courage, Moliere, this is true comedy.”  The learned Menage was the only member of the society who had the good sense to detect the drift; he perceived the snake in the grass.  “We must now,” said this sensible pedant (in a remote allusion to the fate of idolatry and the introduction of Christianity) to the poetical pedant, Chapelain, “follow the counsel which St. Remi gave to Clovis—­we must burn all that we adored, and adore what we have burned.”  The success of the comedy was universal; the company doubled their prices; the country gentry flocked to witness the marvellous novelty, which far exposed that false taste, that romance-impertinence, and that sickly affectation which had long disturbed the quiet of families.  Cervantes had not struck more adroitly at Spanish rodomontade.

At this universal reception of the Precieuses Ridicules, Moliere, it is said, exclaimed—­“I need no longer study Plautus and Terence, nor poach in the fragments of Menander; I have only to study the world.”  It may be doubtful whether the great comic satirist at that moment caught the sudden revelation of his genius, as he did subsequently in his Tartuffe, his Misanthrope, his Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and others.  The Precieuses Ridicules was the germ of his more elaborate Femmes Savantes, which was not produced till after an interval of twelve years.

Moliere returned to his old favourite canevas, or plots of Italian farces and novels, and Spanish comedies, which, being always at hand, furnished comedies of intrigue. L’Ecole des Maris is an inimitable model of this class.

But comedies which derive their chief interest from the ingenious mechanism of their plots, however poignant the delight of the artifice of the denouement, are somewhat like an epigram, once known, the brilliant point is blunted by repetition.  This is not the fate of those representations of men’s actions, passions, and manners, in the more enlarged sphere of human nature, where an eternal interest is excited, and will charm on the tenth repetition.