court of Louis the Fourteenth; to such an extent, indeed, that the latter directed that the poet should never be refused admission to him, at whatever hour he might choose to pay his visit. This regard for his friend was testified by his remark, rather more candid than courteous, to an abbé of his acquaintance, who had brought him an epitaph of his own writing upon the deceased poet. "Would to Heaven," said the prince, "that he were in a condition to bring me yours!"
We have already wandered beyond the limits which we had assigned to ourselves for an abstract of Molière's literary labours, and of the most interesting anecdotes in his biography. Without entering, therefore, into a criticism on his writings, of which the public stand in no need, we shall dismiss the subject with a few brief reflections on their probable influence, and on the design of the author in producing them.
The most distinguished French critics, with the overweening partiality in favour of their own nation, so natural and so universal, placing Molière by common consent at the head of their own comic writers, have also claimed for him a pre-eminence over those of every other age and country, A. W. Schlegel, a very competent judge in these matters, has degraded him, on the other hand, from the walks of high comedy to the writer of "buffoon farces, for which his genius and inclination seem to have essentially fitted him;" adding, moreover, that "his characters are not drawn from nature, but from the fleeting and super-
