[Footnote A:  They were written at the request of Madame de Maintenon, for the pupils of her favourite establishment at St. Cyr; she was anxious that they should be perfect in declamation, and she tried them with the poet’s Andromaque, but they recited it with so much passion and feeling that they alarmed their patroness, who told Racine “it was so well done that she would be careful they should never act that drama again,” and urged him to write plays on sacred subjects expressly for their use.  He had not written a play for upwards of ten years; he now composed his Esther, making that character a flattering reflection of Maintenon’s career.—­ED.]

Boileau and Racine derived little or no profit from the booksellers.  Boileau particularly, though fond of money, was so delicate on this point that he gave all his works away.  It was this that made him so bold in railing at those authors qui mettent leur Apollon aux gages d’un libraire, and he declared that he had only inserted these verses,

  Je sai qu’un noble esprit peut sans honte et sans crime
  Tirer de son travail un tribut legitime,

to console Racine, who had received some profits from the printing of his tragedies.  Those profits were, however, inconsiderable; the truth is, the king remunerated the poets.

Racine’s first royal mark of favour was an order signed by Colbert for six hundred livres, to give him the means of continuing his studies of the belles-lettres.  He received, by an account found among his papers, above forty thousand livres from the cassette of the king, by the hand of the first valet-de-chambre.  Besides these gifts, Racine had a pension of four thousand livres as historiographer, and another pension as a man of letters.

Which is the more honourable? to crouch for a salary brought by the hand of the first valet-de-chambre, or to exult in the tribute offered by the public to an author?

* * * * *

OF STERNE.

Cervantes is immortal—­Rabelais and STERNE have passed away to the curious.

These fraternal geniuses alike chose their subjects from their own times.  Cervantes, with the innocent design of correcting a temporary folly of his countrymen, so that the very success of the design might have proved fatal to the work itself; for when he had cut off the heads of the Hydra, an extinct monster might cease to interest the readers of other times, and other manners.  But Cervantes, with judgment equal to his invention, and with a cast of genius made for all times, delighted his contemporaries and charms his posterity.  He looked to the world and collected other follies than the Spanish ones, and to another age than the administration of the duke of Lerma; with more genuine pleasantry than any writer from the days of Lucian, not a solitary spot has soiled the purity of his page; while there is scarcely a subject in human, nature for which we might not find some apposite illustration.  His style, pure as his thoughts, is, however, a magic which ceases to work in all translations, and Cervantes is not Cervantes in English or in French; yet still he retains his popularity among all the nations of Europe; which is more than we can say even of our Shakspeare!