THE PROGRESS OF FRENCH COMEDY. 1 9 morose judgment of Boileau in his favour. Had Regnard lived a century later he might have been a French Byron ; but in his days romantic adventure was not a path to popularity, nor did men who enjoyed to the full all the good things of this world think it necessary to bemoan themselves for the fact of their having enjoyed them. Regnard’s plays were closely modelled on Moliere, and in Le Joueur, Le Ltgataire, and others, he came very near to his master. In their turn Dufresny and Dancourt came nearest to Regnard, if bulk of production and general excellence are to be taken into account ; but the joint authors Brueys and Palaprat, who modernised LAvocat Pathelin (one of the best farces, and, thanks to them, incom- parably the best known of the fifteenth century) produced in that and in Le Grandeur perhaps the best plays next to Regnard’s of the immediate Molieresque tradition. All these authors, however, and some others, are simply of the brood of Moliere. They may be said indeed to fall off from his style in this respect, that they show in their works no type of the time as he had showed the marquis and the pre- cieuses and the femmes savantes of Louis’ court. A distinct addition to Moliere in this sense was not given until Lesage, in 1709, immortalised in Turcaret the type of the financier, lowborn, made important by his wealth, and courted for it by the hereditary aristocracy. The type has not yet become obsolete, and it has hardly been more successfully enshrined in literature than by the author of Gil Bias. Lesage had in him, no doubt, the stuff of much other por- traiture of the same kind. But the actors of the Theatre Francais had become a power to which, as to other powers, the independent spirit of the novelist was not disposed to bend, and his dramatic talent was almost entirely diverted to the supply of trifles of the vaudeville kind for the Theatre de la Foire. His contemporary Destouches was less stiff- necked or more fortunate. He devoted himself almost entirely to the legitimate drama, and some of his work {Le Glorieux, Le Philosophe Marie, etc.) is of very high excel- lence. Another contemporary of Lesage, Piron, the wittiest epigrammatist of France, worked, like Lesage, chiefly for the C 2
