time when gambling has become a national vice, he neglects it in order to proceed with his fun. If, too, he describes rather accurately the corruption which prevailed from the late seventeenth century to the early Regency, he does so without prejudice, accepting the world frankly as it is. If his valets are more disrespectful and more intimate with their masters than in the works of his predecessors, he is not planning a social revolution. He does not yet conceive of the "après moi le déluge." To us his comedies furnish side-lights on society and presentiments of what is to come; but to him and his audience they furnished only light amusement.

Yet Regnard is no mean writer of comedy. Without the depth of Molière, his plays are remarkable for style, action, and skill in plot-construction. In his maturer years, when he has mastered the Alexandrine line, his style is his personality. He writes in free, quick, vivid comic verse, as spontaneous as his laughter. Movement seems to be as natural in his plays as in his life. His dénouements are often superior in clever management to those of Molière. In general, Regnard's characters are never studied, but rather caricatured, printed in large lines, full of bold selfishness, of the joyous corruption of the time. He presents handsome chevaliers, amiable penniless marquises, gamblers, seekers after dowries and inheritances, shrewd girls anxious to have their fling, tricky shop-girls, -in short a society that is thoroughly cynical and careless of appearances. But he does so without satirizing or grumbling.

Le Joueur is among the first of his more serious attempts at comedy. The subject had the advantage of actuality, but Regnard did not attempt to give a moral lesson to his contemporaries. His business is to entertain. Having been a moderate gambler himself, he cannot afford to be too severe on the poor wretch Valère, who runs to his mistress only for consolation in his losses. Regnard does not attempt to depict the horrors of this terrible passion as does his contemporary Mrs. Centlivre in her English adaptation of the theme in her Gamester, or later Saurin in Beverley. Regnard insists that his gambler be amusing even in his distresses. There is only the slightest trace of the seriousness of purpose of Molière, along with some of the realism of Le Sage; there is none of the sadness or melancholy of the mid-century generation.

Before Regnard produces his masterpiece, he turns aside to present le Retour imprévu in one act and in prose, which is copied from Plautus' Mostellaria (The Haunted House). It is almost a retrograde movement toward farce, and very inferior to the Latin original. In les Folies amoureuses he returns to the pure Italian farce, yet with a style far superior to the typical farce. Carnaval and Folie are personified. In the prologue, the god Momus comes down from Olympus (Versailles), where the gods (the king and his court) no longer laugh, to organize a troupe of comedians. As Molière in l'Impromptu de Versailles, Regnard gives their real names to the actors, who enter whole-heartedly into the spirit of the carnival. Once more Regnard turns to Plautus in Les Ménechmes, his most classic comedy, a.work dedicated to Boileau. In the prologue he invokes both Molière and Plautus; but the latter is his real ancestor, of the same temperament, sometimes trivial and sometimes burlesque. His buffoonery is often so excessive as to offend the proprieties and all sense of reality. The theme is that of twin brothers who are subjected to various tricks and turns of fortune because of their resemblance. In Plautus the plot is very simple, while Re

gnard, like Shakespeare in The Comedy of Errors, has made it more complicated, added more characters, and continued his laughter which called forth the remark of Boileau when someone called Regnard médiocre: "Il n'est pas médiocrement plaisant."

Le Légataire universel (1708), at the end of his career, occupies somewhat the same place in his life and works as le Malade imaginaire in Molière's, except that the latter is not Molière's masterpiece. There are certain similarities in theme: the plot of both plays centers in the figure of the old man too slow to die and leave his fortune to others. (For the sources and parallels of the plot, see the works of Toldo and Altrocchi, cited below.) But the diverse treatment exemplifies admirably the essential difference between the spirit of the two dramatists Molière the thoughtful, quiet, suffering student of human nature; Regnard, the pleasure-loving, active, jovial, robust apostle of broad laughter. It is characteristic of Regnard to make the most of the comedy of the situation, and of Molière more subtly to play upon the comedy of personality; of the one to surprise with unforeseen shifts in the plot, of the other progressively to illuminate the recesses of human character. Molière evokes the intelligent smile or at most that "thoughtful laughter," which belongs, as Meredith declares, to high comedy; in Regnard the dominant note is laughter hilarious, unrestrained, intemperate. Just as the most notable English treatment of the greed of legacy hunters, Ben Jonson's Volpone, deviates from the golden mean of comedy in the direction of grim satire, too full of saeva indignato for true comic spirit, so Regnard deviates towards frivolity and farce.

Bibliography:Œuvres, Paris, éditions 1708, 1731, 1789-90, 1819-20, 1822. Théâtre de Regnard, édition G. D. Heylli, 2 vols., Paris, 1876. P. TOLDO: Études sur le théâtre de Regnard, in Revue d'Histoire littéraire, 1903-4-5. COMPAIGNON DE MARCHÉVILLE: Bibliographie et Iconographie des œuvres de J.-F. Regnard, Paris, 1877. E. BERNBAUM: The Drama of Sensibility, New York, 1915. R. ALTROCCHI: The story of Dante's Gianni Schicchi and Regnard's Légataire Universel, in P. M. L. A., Vol. 29, 1914, p. 200 ff.

2 frais du luminaire, cost of the candles used to light the church for the funeral ceremony 3 fille de France, the Sorbonne, whose medical school was frequently satirized in comedy

Serait-il juste aussi qu'un si bel héritage ERASTE.