brilliancy, rather resembling Congreve than Molière, and this, being unquestionably the best of its kind that a Parisian audience had heard for a generation, probably secured the popularity of the piece. _Turcaret_ is a much more important production. It has the full five acts of a regular comedy, and, though its plot is rather loose, the ruin and discomfiture of the financier Turcaret give a sufficient unity to it. The action, too, is well sustained, but the merit of the piece--a merit for which it stands almost alone in the French comedy of the eighteenth century--lies in the striking projection of the characters and the lively natural traits with which they are drawn. The objection which has been made to these characters--that they are rather partial than complete sketches of human nature--applies to all French drama and to almost all artificial comedy, whether French or English. It would not be easy to find a French drama, out of Molière, in which so many figures stand out so strikingly from the canvass, as is the case in _Turcaret_. The financier, ashamed of the lowness of his origin, ruthless to his debtors, and a swindler in his dealings with his associates, but capable of being bubbled of his money in the most open fashion by a great lady who condescends to permit his addresses; his wife, an incarnation of vulgar provincial vice, as desperately jealous of her husband as she is shamelessly unfaithful to him; the chevalier who exploits Turcaret's mistress just as that mistress exploits Turcaret; the baroness, not too scrupulous to plunder her suitor so long as she believes his addresses to be honourable, but generous enough and not wholly corrupted; the reckless marquis, who has at least the advantage over his friend, the chevalier, that he is not a knave: all these characters, in themselves mere stock characters of the oldest date, are made to live and breathe by touches of Lesage's genius. The most often-quoted scene of the play, where Madame Turcaret, introduced to the baroness's salon, gives an account of the diversions of Valognes, where "on lit tout les ouvrages d'esprit qu'on fait à Cherbourg, à St. Lo et à Coutances, qui valent bien les ouvrages de Vire et de Caen" is a masterpiece of its kind, and not much less can be said of the adroit servility of the waiting-maid Lisette. Frontin, her lover, has the defect of all the valets who descend from the Menandrian comedy--the defect of exceeding improbability--but he is not more improbable than Molière's Scapins and Gros Renés, and, indeed, not so improbable as some of them. It is also noticeable that, though the dialogue of _Turcaret_ is as full of witticisms as any reasonable man can desire, it has not the fault which is frequently noticeable in French manner-comedies and almost always in English--the fault of letting mere wit combats occupy the characters to the detriment of the dramatic interest of the play. Everything in _Turcaret_ tends duly to its end.