when you have given it; the fair friend, who kindly sacrifices your reputation for a jest; the hypocrite, under every aspect, who deceives the world or himself—these form the various and motley panorama of character which Molière has transferred to his canvass, and which, though mostly drawn from cultivated life, must endure as long as society shall hold together.
Indeed, Molière seems to have possessed all the essential requisites for excelling in genteel comedy: a pure taste, an acute perception of the ridiculous, the tone of elegant dialogue, and a wit brilliant and untiring as Congreve's, but which, instead of wasting itself like his, in idle flashes of merriment, is uniformly directed with a moral or philosophical aim. This obvious didactic purpose, in truth, has been censured as inconsistent with the spirit of the drama, and as belonging rather to satire; bat it secured to him an influence over the literature and the opinions of his own generation which has been possessed by no other comic writer of the moderns.
He was the first to recall his countrymen from the vapid hyperbole and puerile conceits of the ancient farces, and to instruct' them in the maxim which Boileau has since condensed into a memorable verse, that "nothing is beautiful bat what is natural." We have already spoken of the reformation which one of his early pieces effected in the admirers of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and its absurdities; and when this confederacy afterward rallied under an affectation of science, as it had before done of
