for instance, an enthusiastic appreciation of the sublime sentence, 'God
said, Let there be light, and there was light'; for there imagination is
clothed in transparent beauty, and grandeur is achieved by the simplest
means. More completely than any of his great contemporaries, Boileau was
a representative of middle-class France.

Certainly the most famous, and perhaps the greatest, of the writers for
whom Boileau acted as the apologist and the interpreter was MOLIÈRE. In
the literature of France Molière occupies the same kind of position as
Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in
that of England. His glory is more than national--it is universal.
Gathering within the plenitude of his genius the widest and the
profoundest characteristics of his race, he has risen above the
boundaries of place and language and tradition into a large dominion
over the hearts of all mankind. To the world outside France he alone, in
undisputed eminence, speaks with the authentic voice of France herself.

That this is so is owing mainly, of course, to the power of his genius;
but it is also owing, in some degree, to the particular form which his
genius took. Judging by quality alone, it is difficult to say whether
his work stands higher or lower in the scale of human achievement than
that of Racine--whether the breadth of vision, the diversity, and the
humanity of his comedies do or do not counterbalance the poetry, the
intensity, and the perfect art of his friend's tragedies; at least it
seems certain that the difference between the reputations of the two men
with the world in general by no means corresponds with the real
difference in their worth. It is by his very perfection, by the very
completeness of his triumph, that Racine loses. He is so absolute, so
special a product of French genius, that it is well-nigh impossible for
any one not born a Frenchman to appreciate him to the full; it is by his