Nous serons par nos lois les juges des ouvrages; Par nos lois, prose et vers, tout nous sera soumis; Nul n’aura de l’esprit hors nous et nos amis; Nous chercherons partout à trouver à redire, Et ne verrons que nous qui sache bien écrire. Molière has been accused of writing an attack on the higher education of women in _Les Femmes savantes_. What we see in it to-day is an immortal picture of those intellectual impostors of the drawing-room--the not-very-intelligentsia, as they have been wittily called--who exist in every civilised capital and in every generation. The vanities of the rival poets, it is true, are caricatured rather extravagantly, but the caricature is essentially true to life. This is what men and women are like. At least, this is what they are like when they are most exclusive and most satisfied with themselves. Molière knew human nature. That is what makes him so much greater a comic dramatist than any English dramatist who has written since Shakespeare. Molière has been taken to task by many critics since his death. He has been accused even of writing badly. He has been accused of padding, incorrectness, and the use of jargon. He has been told that he should have written none of his plays in verse, but all of them, as he wrote _L’Avare_, in prose. All these criticisms are nine-tenths fatuous. Molière by the use of verse gave comic speech the exhilaration of a game, as Pope did, and literature that has exhilarating qualities of this kind has justified its existence, whether or not it squares with some hard-and-fast theory of poetry. If we cannot define poetry so as to leave room for Molière and Pope, then so much the worse for our definition of poetry. As for padding, I doubt whether any dramatist has ever kept the breath of life in his speech more continuously than Molière. His dialogue is not a flowing tap but a running stream. That Molière’s language may be faulty I will not dispute, as French is an alien and but half-known tongue to me. He produces his effects, whatever his grammar. He has created for us a world, delicious even in its insincerities and absurdities--a world seen through charming, humorous, generous, remorseless eyes--a world held together by wit--a world in which the sins of society dance to the ravishing music of the alexandrine. IV EDMUND BURKE