It was usual, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, to consider the acting of plays a valuable aid to liberal education, suitable pieces being often written by the heads of the institutions in which they were to be performed. Dissatisfied with the compositions of Mme. de Brinon, the first superior of St. Cyr, and objecting to the love-making that held such a large place in the works written for the public stage, Mme. de Maintenon applied to Racine, requesting him to write a play that should be entirely suitable for performance by very young ladies. The courtier poet could not refuse, and the result was the play of _Esther_, performed in January, 1689, by pupils of St. Cyr, not one of whom was over seventeen years of age. The success of the play was startling. The king witnessed it repeatedly, and insisted that all his court and guests should do likewise. The performances of _Esther_, at St. Cyr, became great events for the fashionable society of the day. This unlooked-for result was not slow to alarm Mme. de Maintenon: their very success became a danger for the youthful actresses. Accordingly, Mme. de Maintenon discountenanced the resumption of _Esther_ after the first series of performances was concluded, and she entirely withheld from public representation the second play, _Athalie_, written by Racine in the following year for the same purpose. Subsequently Mme. de Maintenon banished dramatic performances altogether from St. Cyr; she concluded it was better to train the _reason_[1] by the _solid_[1] truths of philosophy than the imagination by the unrealities of dramatic literature. 4. THE PLAY OF "ESTHER." The subject of _Esther_ is admirably chosen for the purpose Racine had in view. The story of Esther, owing mainly to the noble character of the queen, is as touching as it is lofty. The poet found it entirely in the Bible, which should be read side by side with the play from beginning to end. Several inspirations, notably that of the beautiful prayer in the first act, are drawn from the "Rest of the Book of Esther," i.e., those chapters which being found only in the Greek, and neither in the Hebrew nor in the Chaldee MSS., are relegated to the Apocrypha. Racine follows the theory of the Abbé de Saci, and takes the Ahasuerus of Scripture to be the Darius of secular history. Modern criticism, however, inclines to see in him neither Darius, nor, as has been proposed on the authority of the "Rest of the Book of Esther" (xii. 2), Artaxerxes Longimanus, but Xerxes, the immediate successor of Darius.