Racine himself says in the Preface to _Esther_:

The young ladies have declaimed and sung this
work with so much modesty and piety, it has not
been possible to keep it shut up in the secrecy of
the institution; so that a diversion of young people
has become a subject of interest for all the Court;

and what is still more speaking, he wrote at once the _Athalie_,
"la chef d'oeuvre de la poésie française," in the judgment of the
French critics, to be rendered by the some young tyros. When, in
1556, in Christ Church Hall, _Palamon and Arcite_ was finished,
outspoken Queen Bess, with her frank eyes full of pleasure, declared
"that Palamon must have been in love indeed. Arcite was a right
martial knight, having a swart and manly countenance, yet like a Venus
clad in armour." To the son of the dean of Christ Church, the boy of
fourteen, who played Emilie in the dress of a princess, her compliment
was still higher. It was a present of eight guineas,--for the
penurious sovereign, perhaps, the most emphatic expression of approval
possible.

Shall I admit for a moment that our American young folks have less
grace and sensibility than the French girls, and the Oxford youths who
pleased Elizabeth? Your face now, Fastidiosus, wears a frown like
that of Rhadamanthus; but I remember our Hasty-Pudding days, when you
played the part of a queen, and behaved in your disguise like Thor,
in the old saga, when he went to Riesenheim in the garb of Freya, and
honest giants, like Thrym, were frightened back the whole width of the
hall. Well, I do not censure it, and I do not believe you recall it
with a sigh; and the reminiscence emboldens me to ask you whether it