_C'est par-là que Molière, illustrant ses écrits,_ _Peut-être de son art eût emporté le prix,_ _Si, moins ami du peuple en ses doctes peintures,_ _Il n'eût fait quelquefois, grimacer ses figures,_ _Quitté pour le bouffon l'agréable et fin,_ _Et sans honte à Terence allié Tabarin._ _Dans ce sac ridicule où Scapin s'enveloppe,_ _Je ne reconnais plus l'auteur du Misanthrope._ Molière in comic genius had excelled, And might, perhaps, have stood unparalleled, Had he his faithful portraits ne'er allowed To gape and grin to gratify the crowd; Deserting wit for low grimace and jest, And showing Terence in a motley vest. Who in the sack, where Scapin plays the fool, Will find the genius of the comic school? But it must be considered that Raphael condescended to paint grotesque figures. Molière would not have descended so low, if all his spectators had been such men as Louis XIV., Condé, Turenne, La Rochefoucauld, Montausier, Beauvilliers, and such women as Montespan and Thianges; but he had also to please the whole people of Paris, who were yet quite unpolished. The citizen liked broad farce, and he paid for it. Scarron's "Jodelets" were all the rage. We are obliged to place ourselves on the level of our age, before we can rise above it; and, after all, we like to laugh now and then. What is Homer's "Battle of the Frogs and Mice," but a piece of buffoonery--a burlesque poem? Works of this kind give no reputation, but they may take from that which we already enjoy. Buffoonery is not always in the burlesque style, "The Physician in Spite of Himself," and the "Rogueries of Scapin," are not in the style of Scarron's "Jodelets." Molière does not, like Scarron, go in search of slang terms; his lowest characters do not play the mountebank. Buffoonery is in the thing, not in the expression. Boileau's "Lutrin" was at first called a burlesque poem, but it was the subject that was burlesque; the style was pleasing and refined, and sometimes even heroic. The Italians had another kind of burlesque, much superior to ours--that of Aretin, of Archbishop La Caza, of Berni, Mauro, and Dolce. It often sacrifices decorum to pleasantry, but obscene words are wholly banished from it. The subject of Archbishop La Caza's _"Capitolo del Forno"_ is, indeed, that which sends the Desfontaines to the Bicêtre, and the Deschaufours to the Place de Grève: but there is not one word offensive to the ear of chastity; you have to divine the meaning. Three or four Englishmen have excelled in this way: Butler, in his "Hudibras," which was the civil war excited by the Puritans turned into ridicule; Dr. Garth, in his "Dispensary"; Prior, in his "Alma," in which he very pleasantly makes a jest of his subject and Phillips, in his "Splendid Shilling."