Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/271

 Earle's Microcosmography and Overbury's Characters. It was individualism within the circle of the "Grand Monarch's" court that produced at once the Caractères of La Bruyère and the comedies of Molière.

Bringing out his first comedy in the very year of Demosthenes' death (322 ), Menander, the model of Terence, is a literary man who may be said to occupy the unique position of a link at once between Athens and Alexandria, and between Athens and Rome. The drama, like the written dialogue of criticism and the written speech, had now become an instrument of the literary artist rather than a public voice addressing itself to the people; and the enormous number of comedies attributed to the later comedians, contrasted with the small number of their victories, has been regarded as an evidence of their plays having been intended to be read, and fulfilling to some extent the functions of the critical press in our days. Thus the severance of literature from practical life—a severance in which some modern critics have discovered a kind of literary Arcadia—was everywhere accompanying the decadence of the creative spirit. We need not here