Denounced, persecuted, and buried hugger-mugger two hundred years ago, you are now not over-praised, but more worshipped, with more servility and ostentation, studied with more prying curiosity than you may approve.  Are not the Molie’ristes a body who carry adoration to fanaticism?  Any scrap of your handwriting (so few are these), any anecdote even remotely touching on your life, any fact that may prove your house was numbered 15 not 22, is eagerly seized and discussed by your too minute historians.  Concerning your private life, these men often write more like malicious enemies than friends; repeating the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger, and trying vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers.  It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—­from such friends as the veteran and inveterate M. Arse’ne Houssaye, or the industrious but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur.  Truly they seek the living among the dead, and the immortal Molie’re among the sweepings of attorneys’ offices.  As I regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their trivialities—­the exercises of men who neglect Molie’re’s works to write about Molie’re’s great-grandmother’s second-best bed—­I sometimes wish that Molie’re were here to write on his devotees a new comedy, ‘Les Molie’ristes.’  How fortunate were they, Monsieur, who lived and worked with you, who saw you day by day, who were attached, as Lagrange tells us, by the kindest loyalty to the best and most honourable of men, the most open-handed in friendship, in charity the most delicate, of the heartiest sympathy!  Ah, that for one day I could behold you, writing in the study, rehearsing on the stage, musing in the lace-seller’s shop, strolling through the Palais, turning over the new books at Billaine’s, dusting your ruffles among the old volumes on the sunny stalls.  Would that, through the ages, we could hear you after supper, merry with Boileau, and with Racine,—­not yet a traitor,—­laughing over Chapelain, combining to gird at him in an epigram, or mocking at Cotin, or talking your favourite philosophy, mindful of Descartes.  Surely of all the wits none was ever so good a man, none ever made life so rich with humour and friendship.

XIX.

To Robert Burns.

Sir,—­Among men of Genius, and especially among Poets, there are some to whom we turn with a peculiar and unfeigned affection; there are others whom we admire rather than love.  By some we are won with our will, by others conquered against our desire.  It has been your peculiar fortune to capture the hearts of a whole people—­a people not usually prone to praise, but devoted with a personal and patriotic loyalty to you and to your reputation.  In you every Scot who is a Scot sees, admires, and compliments Himself, his ideal self—­ independent, fond of whisky, fonder of the lassies; you are the true representative of him and of his nation.  Next year will be the hundredth since