ed; his features large, his complexion dark, and his black, bushy eyebrows so flexible as to admit of his giving an infinetely comic expression to his physiognomy. He was the best actor of his own generation, and, by his counsels, formed the celebrated Baron, the best of the succeeding. He played all the range of his own characters, from Alceste to Sganarelle, though he seems to have been peculiarly fitted for broad comedy. He composed with rapidity, for which Boilean has happily complimented him:

Unlike in this to Boileau himself, and to Racine, the former of whom taught the latter, if we may credit his son, "the art of rhyming with difficulty." Of course, the verses of Molière have neither the correctness nor the high finish of those of his two illustrious rivals.

He produced all his pieces, amounting to thirty, in the short space of fifteen years. He was in the habit of reading these to an old female domestic by the name of La Forêt, on whose unsophisticated judgment he greatly relied. On one occasion, when he attempted to impose upon her the production of a brother author, she plainly told him that he had never written it, Sir Walter Scott may have had this habit of Molière's in his mind when he introduced a similar expedient into his "Chronicles of the Canongate." For the same reason, our poet used to request the comedians to bring their children with