dramatic and other literary rules. Of French comedy a different story must be told. It is impossible to mention the name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, the contemporary of Corneille and Racine, without feeling that we are naming the world’s best writer of comedy pure and simple, next to Aristophanes. What Shakespeare might have done if he had written comedies alone, we cannot tell. Wherever his mature plays offer us undiluted comedy, it is superlatively comic. Yet we do not think of him primarily in connection with Aristophanes and Molière, but rather as the writer of _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_. If we named an English author whose genius in many respects recalls Molière, it would perhaps be Sheridan, the writer of the _School for Scandal_. In Molière there comes out the best side of the peculiar French genius, the Gallic wit, the trenchant satire without brutality, the keen entertainment without vulgarity. Molière at his zenith makes comedy a work of art, and of refined art; a comedy which edifies while it delights, and which delights without appealing to the lower elements of our nature. It is a humorous feast of the delighted reason, not a pandering to a mere taste for “lungs tickle o’ the sere.” His _Précieuses Ridicules_ is keen and killing criticism of the silly affectations of a literary coterie; his _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ slays the ignorant parvenu, and his _Tartuffe_ the hypocrite. This comedy, delightful now to read as it was then to see, could not but seize hold upon Englishmen of the Restoration times and later still. Molière was copied, adapted, translated by English writers, and that not merely for reading, but for acting purposes. Dryden translated _L’Etourdi_ as _Sir Martin Mar-all_; Vanbrugh turned _Le Dépit Amoureux_ into _The Mistake_; Wycherley offered _The Plain Dealer_ as a version of _Le Misanthrope_; Fielding’s _Mock-Doctor_ is _Le Médecin Malgré Lui_, his _Miser_ is Molière’s _L’Avare_; Colley Cibber converted _Tartuffe_ into _The Non-Juror_. So much at least does English literature proper owe to French tragedy and comedy. Of the constant plagiarism and adaptation of French plays in modern times nothing need be said, since these things have been for the most part hardly literature in the proper meaning of the term. * * * * *