this difference of conduct indicates may afford a subject of contemplation by no means unpleasing to the philanthropist.
In the year 1792, during that memorable period in France when an affectation of reverence for their illustrious dead was strangely mingled with the persecution of the living, the Parisians resolved to exhume the remains of La Fontaine and Molière, in order to transport them to a more honourable place of interment. Of the relics thus obtained, it is certain that no portion belonged to La Fontaine, and it is extremely probable that none did to Molière. Whosesoever they may have been, they did not receive the honours for which their repose had been disturbed. With the usual fickleness of the period, they were shamefully transferred from one place to another, or abandoned to neglect for seven years, when the patriotic conservator of the Monumens Français succeeded in obtaining them for his collection at the Petits Augustins. On the suppression of this institution in 1817, the supposed ashes of the two poets were, for the last time, transported to the spacious cemetery of Père de la Chaise, where the tomb of the author of the Tartuffe is designated by an inscription in Latin, which, as if to complete the scandal of the proceedings, is grossly mistaken in the only fact which it pretends to record, namely, the age of the poet at the time of his decease.
Molière died soon after entering upon his fifty-second year. He is represented to have been somewhat above the middle stature, and well proportion-
