inopportune brawler.  For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts extinction in a night of Frost.  The sun will grow cold, slowly—­as slowly as doom came on Jupiter in your ‘Prometheus,’ but as surely.  If this nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equator, will read. by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley.  So reading, he, the latest of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life worth enduring.  In your verse he will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse, he will be face to face, in fancy, with the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure of the heavens.  In Shelley’s poetry, while Man endures, all those will survive; for your ‘voice is as the voice of winds and tides,’ and perhaps more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing of the human spirit.

XVIII.

To Monsieur de Molie’re, Valet de Chambre du Roi.

Monsieur,—­With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the great Molie’re!  As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his comb!) at the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near your dwelling among the Immortals.  You, like the king who, among all his titles, has now none so proud as that of the friend of Molie’re—­you found your dominions small, humble, and distracted; you raised them to the dignity of an empire:  what Louis XIV. did for France you achieved for French comedy; and the ba’ton of Scapin still wields its sway though the sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim.  For the King the Pyrenees, or so he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more magnificent conquest you overcame the Channel.  If England vanquished your country’s arms, it was through you that France ferum victorem cepit, and restored the dynasty of Comedy to the land whence she had been driven.  Ever since Dryden borrowed ‘L’Etourdi,’ our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.

In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered.  While you lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Molie’re.  Now they are diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain.  But still, as has ever been our wont since Etherege saw, and envied, and imitated your successes—­still we pilfer the plays of France, and take our bien, as you said in your lordly manner, wherever we can find it.  We are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a comedy pleases the town which has not first been ‘cut out’