ose rich sources of
invention when persons living more isolated, society was less monotonous;
and Jonson and Shadwell gave us what they called "_the humours_,"--that
is, the individual or particular characteristics of men.[A]

[Footnote A: Aubrey has noted this habit of our two greatest dramatists,
when speaking of Shakspeare he says--"The humour of the constable in _A
Midsummer Night's Dream_, he happened to take at Grendon in Bucks; which
is the roade from London to Stratford; and there was living that constable
in 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Ben Jonson and he did gather humours
of men dayly, wherever they came." Shadwell, whose best plays were
produced in the reign of Charles II., was a professed imitator of the
style of Jonson; and so closely described the manners of his day that he
was frequently accused of direct personalities, and obliged to alter one
of his plays, _The Humorists_, to avoid an outcry raised against him. Sir
Walter Scott has recorded, in the Preface to his "Fortunes of Nigel," the
obligation he was under to Shadwell's comedy, _The Squire of Alsatia_, for
the vivid description it enabled him to give of the lawless denizens of
the old Sanctuary of Whitefriars.--ED.]

But however tastes and modes of thinking may be inconstant, and customs
and manners alter, at bottom the groundwork is Nature's, in every
production of comic genius. A creative genius, guided by an unerring
instinct, though he draws after the contemporary models of society, will
retain his pre-eminence beyond his own age and his own nation; what was
temporary and local disappears, but what appertains to universal nature
endures. The scholar dwells on the grotesque pleasantries of the sarcastic
Aristophanes, though the Athenian manners, and his exotic personages, have
long vanished.

MOLIERE was a creator in the _art of comedy_; and although his personages
were the contemporaries of Louis the Fourteenth, and his manners, in the
critical acceptation of the term, local and temporary, yet his admirable
genius opened that secret path of Nature, which is so rarely found among
the great names of the most literary nations. CERVANTES remains single in
Spain; in England SHAKSPEARE is a consecrated name; and centuries may pass
away before the French people shall witness another MOLIERE.

The history of this comic poet is the tale of powerful genius creating
itself amidst the most adverse elements. We have the progress of that
self-educatio