from the countrymen of Molie’re.  Why this should be, and what ’tenebriferous star’ (as Paracelsus, your companion in the ‘Dialogues des Morts,’ would have believed) thus darkens the sun of English humour, we know not; but certainly our dependence on France is the sincerest tribute to you.  Without you, neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor ‘a wilderness of monkeys’ like Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to France and restored her to Europe.

While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to you that we must turn when of comedies we desire the best.  If you studied with daily and nightly care the works of Plautus and Terence, if you ’let no musty bouquin escape you’ (so your enemies declared), it was to some purpose that you laboured.  Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all who came before you; and from those that follow, however fresh, we turn:  we turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais, from Sheridan:  and Goldsmith, from Musset and Pailleron and Labiche, to that crowded world of your creations.  ‘Creations’ one may well say, for you anticipated Nature herself:  you gave us, before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a gentleman not a lacquey; in a mot of Don Juan’s, the secret of the new Religion and the watchword of Comte, l’amour de l’humanite’.

Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour; and where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of a secular civilisalion?  With a heart the most tender, delicate, loving, and generous, a heart often in agony and torment, you had to make life endurable (we cannot doubt it) without any whisper of promise, or hope, or warning from Religion.  Yes, in an age when the greatest mind of all, the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only help was in voluntary blindness, that the only chance was to hazard all on a bet at evens, you, Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to pretend to see what you found invisible.

In Religion you beheld no promise of help.  When the Jesuits and Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait of their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises in your play conceived that you were girding at his neighbour), you all the while were mocking every credulous excess of Faith.  In the sermons preached to Agne’s we surely hear your private laughter; in the arguments for credulity which are presented to Don Juan by his valet we listen to the eternal self-defence of superstition.  Thus, desolate of belief, you sought for the permanent element of life—­precisely where Pascal recognised all that was most fleeting and unsubstantial—­in divertissement; in the pleasure of looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of the follies of mankind.  Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to regard our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the tragic note comes in!  What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of tears, as of rain in the wind!  No comedian has been so kindly and human as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his butts, and to leave them sometimes, in a sense, superior to their tormentors.  Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the rest—­our sympathy, somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de Pourceaugnac is a gentleman, despite his misadventures.