In twenty-four hours Caron had laid violent hands on his ‘Barber,’ shortened him, enlivened him, cut out his distasteful jokes and his dubious moralities, and ‘under the pressure of a discontented and disappointed public’ turned him into a masterpiece. At its second performance the play was applauded to the skies. It ran through the whole winter season. It delighted its author to print it with its title-page running: ‘The Barber of Seville, Comedy in Four Acts, represented and failed at the Comédie Française.’ It drew on him one of his dear lawsuits, and enabled him to place the rights of dramatists over their works on a new and firm basis, and to found the first Society of Dramatic Authors. Far above all, it led the way to ‘Figaro.’ The subject of ‘The Barber of Seville’ is the time-honoured one of the amorous old guardian who falls in love with his ward; only Beaumarchais’ guardian is a wit, not a fool. It is the defect, indeed, of both his great plays that all the characters are wits. He fell into Sheridan’s fault, and made his _personæ_ the mouthpieces of his own cleverness. He wholly lacked the far higher and finer genius, the exquisite fidelity to life and character, which made Shakespeare give to each of his creatures the special kind of cleverness, and no other, proper to its nature. Not the less, Beaumarchais writes with a lightness and effervescence which are without counterpart in dramatic literature. ‘The Barber of Seville’ was taken, it is said, from an opera of Sedaine’s, and was itself originally designed to be a comic opera. Nothing but a quarrel with the composer of the score prevented it from first appearing in that form in which it is to-day most familiar to the world. Yet it hardly needs an accompaniment of lively music. The airs and the singing are there already--in the gay _bizarrerie_ of situation, the laughing swing of repartee, and the brilliant recitative of the longer speeches. The characters, called by Spanish names and dressed in Spanish clothes, are thoroughly and essentially French. Its exquisite delicacy of touch and its rippling mocking gaiety declare it, in fact, not only the work of a Frenchman, but one of the most Gallic pieces that have ever held the stage. It inaugurated a new order of comedy, and introduced into it a new character: the Barber, who was also wit, hero, and moralist--the character of Figaro. Beaumarchais was not at all the man to sit down and tranquilly enjoy his first dramatic triumph. He must not only follow it up by writing another, but he must with enormous difficulty, at the risk of much money, and three years’ hard work, become the editor of the first complete edition of Voltaire’s works ever given to the public.