The Dramatic Works of Moliete. Translated into English by Henri
Van Lann. Vol. V. (Edinburgh : William Paterson.)—This fifth volume contains two of the more celebrated of Moliere's plays, L'Avare and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and three minor pieces, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Les Amants Magnifiques, and Psyche. M. Van Latin supplies, as usual, his interesting prolegomena about the circumstances under which these various pieces were produced. The " introductory notice " to Les Amants Magmfiques gives us an insight into the extrava- gance of the Court of the Grand Monarque, one of the causes which were preparing for France the grand catastrophe of the Revolution. The first representation of the play cost more than forty-three thousand livres ; another, in the following month, cost nearly seventeen thousand ; and on a third occasion, it was "played before the Duke of Buck- ingham, in a theatre built on purpose, and at a cost of about nine thousand livres." An appendix to each piece gives the passages which Moliere has imitated from others, or in which he has himself been imitated. Of Les Amants Diagnifigues the translator remarks, "Won- derful to relate, nothing has been borrowed from this play by English dramatists, at least as far as I have been able to trace." We may mention in connection with this the first volume of what appears likely to be a valuable work,—The Dramatic Works of Moliere, translated into English prose, with short introductions and explanatory notes, by Charles Heron Wall (Bell and Sons). We hope to have an opportunity of returning to it at some future time.
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