allow Moliere the rank of the greatest comic writer of all the world. _Castigat ridendo mores_ is a motto which no one challenges with such a certainty of victory as he. Although the number and the diversity of Moliere's works were well calculated to encourage imitators, it was some time before the imitators appeared. Unlike Racine, whose method was at once caught up, Moliere saw during his lifetime no one who could even pretend to be a rival. Those who are now classed as being in some degree of his time were for the most part in their cradles when his masterpieces were being acted. Regnard, the best of them, was born two years after the appearance of _Le Depit Amoureux_ and only three years before the appearance of _Les Precieuses Ridicules_. Baron was his pupil and adoring disciple. Dufresny was but just of age, and Dancourt but ten years old, at his death. Brueys and Palaprat (the Beaumont and Fletcher, _mutatis mutandis_, of the French stage) did not make up their curious association till long after that event, at the date of which Le Sage was five years old. Quinault, Boursault, and Montfleury alone were in active rivalry with him, and though none of them was destitute of merit, the merit of none of them was in the least comparable to his. He owed this advantage, for such it was, to his relatively early death and to the wonderfully short space of time in which his masterpieces were produced. Moliere is identified with the age of Louis XIV., yet _Les Precieuses Ridicules_ was written years after the king's nominal accession, and even after his actual assumption of the reins of government from the hands of Mazarin, while _Le Malade Imaginaire_ was acted by its dying author more than forty years before the great king's reign ended. [Sidenote: Contemporaries of Moliere.]