Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/82

 50 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS And were he to be dethroned, to whom should the sceptre and the crown be given ? Lord Bacon had a kingly soul, capacious great thoughts, and high de- signs, but no one who has read his metrical translation of the Psalms of David will be troubled again with doubts whether he was the writer also of *' Macbeth," " Othello," and " Lear." Compared with these sterile, bald, and mechanical qua. trains, the sacred hymns of Isaac Watts are howling and bacchanalian anacreon tics, to be hiccoughed by drunkards in their most abandoned hours of revelry. Pondering upon the mystery as I walked up and down beneath the flaring lights, on the windy platform at Bletchley, waiting, after a day at Stratford, for a belated train to London, I reflected that genius has no pedigree nor prescrip- tion, and that at last the greatest marvel was, not that the tragedy of " Hamlet" was written by Shakespeare, but that it was written at all. aid MOLIERE Extracts from "Moliere," by Sir Walter Scott (1622-1673) J' ean-Baptiste Poquelin was christened ai Paris, January 15, 1622. His family con sisted of decent burghers, who had for two ot three generations followed the business of man ufacturers of tapestry, or dealers in thai com modity. Jean Poquelin, the father of the poet also enjoyed the office of valet-de-chambre in the royal household. He endeavored to bring his son up to the same business, but finding thai it was totally inconsistent with the taste ano temper of the young J ean-Baptiste, he placed him at the Jesuits' College of Clermtnt, now the College of Louis-le-Grand. Young Poque lin had scarcely terminated his course of philos ophy when, having obtained the situation of assistant and successor to his father in his post of valet-de-chamore to the king, he was called on to attend Loui<- XT' 1 1, in a tour to Narbonne, which lasted nearly a year. Doubtless, the oppor (unities which this journey afforded him, of comparing the manners and follies <