In
brilliancy of wit he is, among dramatists, inferior only to Aristophanes
and Congreve. But he took a less Rabelaisian licence of range than
Aristophanes, and he never, like Congreve, allows his action to drift
aimlessly while his characters shoot pleasantries at one another. If we
leave purely poetic merit out of the question and restrict the
definition of comedy to the dramatic presentment of the characters and
incidents of actual life, in such a manner as at once to hold the mirror
up to nature and to convey lessons of morality and conduct, we must
allow Moliere the rank of the greatest comic writer of all the world.
_Castigat ridendo mores_ is a motto which no one challenges with such a
certainty of victory as he.

Although the number and the diversity of Moliere's works were well
calculated to encourage imitators, it was some time before the imitators
appeared. Unlike Racine, whose method was at once caught up, Moliere saw
during his lifetime no one who could even pretend to be a rival. Those
who are now classed as being in some degree of his time were for the
most part in their cradles when his masterpieces were being acted.
Regnard, the best of them, was born two years after the appearance of
_Le Depit Amoureux_ and only three years before the appearance of _Les
Precieuses Ridicules_. Baron was his pupil and adoring disciple.
Dufresny was but just of age, and Dancourt but ten years old, at his
death. Brueys and Palaprat (the Beaumont and Fletcher, _mutatis
mutandis_, of the French stage) did not make up their curious
association till long after that event, at the date of which Le Sage was
five years old. Quinault, Boursault, and Montfleury alone were in active
rivalry with him, and though none of them was destitute of merit, the
merit of none of them was in the least comparable to his. He owed this
advantage, for such it was, to his relatively early death and to the
wonderfully short space of time in which his masterpieces were produced.
Moliere is identified with the age of Louis XIV., yet _Les Precieuses
Ridicules_ was written years after the king's nominal accession, and
even after his actual assumption of the reins of government from the
hands of Mazarin, while _Le Malade Imaginaire_ was acted by its dying
author more than forty years before the great king's reign ended.

[Sidenote: Contemporaries of Moliere.]

The three authors just mentioned as actually contemporary with Moliere
require no very length