Molière was the greatest French dramatist. At the height of his career, legend relates, he was such a favorite with the grand monarch, Louis XIV, that this proud king made him come and dine in private with him, so as to convince his servants and courtiers that the genius whom they thought of as a vulgar, impossible boor, a mere actor, was worthy of the greatest consideration. Yet when Molière was dead the king ungratefully refused to see that he was properly buried and the great man was carried to his last resting-place with little ceremony. At the present day one of France's most prominent writers is Rostand, the author of "Cyrano de Bergerac," a play which brought him into instant popularity through its brilliance, although a few weeks before scarcely anyone had heard his name. On the first night of the production, in 1897, the audience cheered and shouted until it seemed as if the performance would break up in the confusion created by its success, yet thanks to Rostand's coolness the actors and even the spectators were kept calm enough to carry the play through to its masterly conclusion. At the close, when the curtain had fallen on the last act, Rostand was sought for everywhere to make his bow to the enthusiastic audience, but he had quietly driven away to his country home, with his wife, and there he stayed for a week or more before the public had a chance to welcome him. Byron is almost the only man in English letters to come so suddenly before the people. He woke up one morning to find himself famous, through the publication of "Childe Harold." Byron was another of the unhappy geniuses. He was hot-headed and married an equally irritable wife, so naturally they separated, with anger and yet with sorrow. His little daughter, who he said was the one friend he had in the world, died at an early age. He dreaded being fat and therefore starved himself, a process which did not make him happier. But his death was in itself enough to redeem him in spite of his irresponsible and rather selfish career, for he gave himself up to the cause of the freedom and independence of the Greeks, and died of fever contracted while preparing for the great campaign against the Turks. Poor Dean Swift, the author of "Gulliver's Travels," the bitterest book ever written about human beings, suffered even more than Byron. He was keenly sensitive, and his political labors were poorly paid because he was none too courteous in his manner to the political leaders for whom he worked so hard. Boot-licking would have brought him the position he desired, but Swift was not a toady, so he was driven to accept the second-rate place offered him, and there vented his anger in the most savage attacks on human nature that can be imagined. All this while he had been fearing that his mind would give way; "I am like that tree," he said to a friend one day when they were out walking, "I shall die at the top first." He was right, for not long afterward his brain gave way.