Few men of genius have left in their writings deeper impressions of their personal feelings than Moliere.  With strong passions in a feeble frame, he had duped his imagination that, like another Pygmalion, he would create a woman by his own art.  In silence and agony he tasted the bitter fruits of the disordered habits of the life of a comedian, a manager, and a poet.  His income was splendid; but he himself was a stranger to dissipation.  He was a domestic man, of a pensive and even melancholy temperament.  Silent and reserved, unless in conversation with that more intimate circle whose literature aided his genius, or whose friendship consoled for his domestic disturbances, his habits were minutely methodical; the strictest order was observed throughout his establishment; the hours of dinner, of writing, of amusement, were allotted, and the slightest derangement in his own apartment excited a morbid irritability which would interrupt his studies for whole days.

Who, without this tale of Moliere, could conjecture, that one skilled in the workings of our nature would have ventured on the perilous experiment of equalizing sixteen years against forty—­weighing roses against grey locks—­to convert a wayward coquette, through her capricious womanhood, into an attached wife?  Yet, although Mademoiselle could cherish no personal love for the intellectual being, and hastened to change the immortal name she bore for a more terrestrial man, she seems to have been impressed by a perfect conviction of his creative genius.  When the Archbishop of Paris, in the pride of prelacy, refused the rites of sepulture to the corpse of Moliere THE ACTOR, it was her voice which reminded the world of Moliere THE POET, exclaiming—­“Have they denied a grave to the man to whom Greece would have raised an altar!”

* * * * *

THE SENSIBILITY OF RACINE.

The “Memoirs of the poet Racine,” composed by his son, who was himself no contemptible poet, may be classed among those precious pieces of biography so delightful to the philosopher who studies human nature, and the literary man whose curiosity is interested in the history of his republic.  Such, works are rare, and rank in merit next to autobiographies.  Such biographical sketches, like Boswell’s of Johnson, contain what we often regret is wanting in the more regular life of a professed biographer.  These desultory memoirs interest by their warmth, their more personal acquaintance with the hero, and abound with those minuter strokes which give so much life to the individual character.

The prominent feature in the character of Racine was an excessive tenderness of feeling; his profound sensibility even to its infirmity, the tears which would cover his face, and the agony in his heart, were perhaps national.  But if this sensibility produced at times the softest emotions, if it made him the poet of lovers, and even the poet of imagination, it also rendered him too feelingly alive to criticism, it embittered his days with too keen a perception of the domestic miseries which all men must alike undergo.