masterpieces like that now in question perpetuate their own renown, and leave a lasting memorial of what is supposed to be a phenomenon, a princely taste for genuine wit. Les Fâcheux was the first piece in which dancing was so connected with the dramatic action, as to fill up the intervals without breaking the thread of the story. Le Mariage Forcé was borrowed from Rabelais, to whom both Moliere and La Fontaine were deeply indebted. The Aristotelian and Pyrrhonian philosophy, as travestied by modern doctors, furnishes occasion for lively satire and clever buffoonery. The horror with which Pancrace calls down the vengeance of heaven on him who should dare to say the _form_ of a hat, instead of the _figure_ of a hat, is a pleasant parody on the unintelligible absurdities of the schools. According to Marphurius, philosophy commands us to suspend our judgment, and to speak of every thing with uncertainty; not to say _I am come_, but, _I think that I am come_. La Princesse d’Elide, though not one of Moliere’s happiest efforts, deserves notice on account of its contributing to the festivities of the court, by an adaptation of ingenious allegories to the manners and events of the time. This satire was aimed at the illusion of Judicial Astrology, after which many princes of the period were running mad; and in particular Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy, father of the Duchess of Burgundy, who kept an astrologer about his person even after his abdication. The dramatic antiquary may find some amusement in comparing the fêtes of the French court with the masques of Ben Jonson, Davenant, and others, exhibited before our James I. and Charles I.; but here the interest ends. It is sufficient to remark, that the masques of the English court owed their power of pleasing to the ingenuity of the machinist and the flattery of the poet. The little dramas performed before the royal family of France tickled the ears of the audience by the pungency of their wit and ridicule. The Miser has been pretty closely translated, for the version is little more, by Henry Fielding; but not so happily as he himself seems to have imagined. The subject of that excellent comedy, Les Femmes Savantes, in which the ridicule is kept within reasonable bounds, and female faults and virtues are painted with a proper gradation of colouring, where what the painters call a _medium tint_ harmonizes the extremes of light and shade, was taken up by Goldoni with that coarse and abrupt pencilling of black and white, which has always been the vice of the Italian stage. It has indeed been advanced as a reproach to Moliere, that he too often charged his comic pictures with the extravagance of caricature: but if we compare even the most farcical of his scenes with the speaking pantomimes and half-improvisations of Italy, we must pronounce him a model of delicacy and classical propriety.