RACINE, JEAN, the most admired of all the French dramatists, was b. at Ferte-Milon, Dec. 21, 1639, of a respectable family belonging to the bourgeohde. At the age of four he lost both his parents, and then went to live with his maternal grandfather, by whom he was sent to the college of Beauvais. Here lie remained till he was 16, at which time his grandfather died. He was then taken to Port Royal (q.v.), where his grandmother and his aunt Agnes were leading a recluse life, and placed at the school which had been Opened in that celebrated retreat by the pious scholars assembled there. Racine asto.,-. ished his teachers by the rapidity of his progress in all his studies, especially in Greek; but he won their regards still more by the affectionate seriousness of his character, which gave a delicacy to his ardent sensibilities and vivid imagination. They loved him, yet they trembled for him. When they saw him wander—Sophocles or Euripides in his hand—among the shadows of the abbey, anxiety took possession of their hearts; and when they learned that he secretly indulged in the sinful pastime of making verses. they even thought it necessary to punish their favorite. Their punishment was indeed an odd one, for they obliged him to turn the hymns of the Roman breviary into French verse! Novels were placed under the same ban as poetry. One day the sacristan Lance lot found him reading the Byzantine romance of bishop Heliodorus (q.v.), entitled The Loves of Theagenes and Charicleia. and threw the book in the fire; but Racine says that it was already fixed in his memory, and that lie smiled at this futile attempt to rob him of it. We can easily see that Racine was not at all ascetically disposed as yet. After a residence of three years at Port Royal, during which time lie had, among other things, read and annotated the best Greek and Latin classics. he went to the college d'Harcourt to finish his curriculum with the study of logic. Then he went out to "see life," got into loose company, became irregular himself, andeven grew so reckless as to burlesque, in his correspondence, the pious phraseology in vogue at Port Royal. Deep was the grief and incessant were the remonstrances of his old friends, but they were long with out avail. He had made some little name as a poet by an ode on the marriage of the king, and had had the good fortune to get a pension for it, but still his income was small and precarious; and when a maternal uncle, who was a canon-regular of the church of St. Genevieve at Uzes, in Languedoc, held out to him the hope of a benefice, Racine went to live with him in 1661, and tried to study systematic theology. But the effort
was a hopeless one. While he gazed vacantly into the Summa of St. Thomas, his thoughts were with Ariosto and Sophocles. In the summer of 1662 he returned to Paris in disgust, and commenced life as a dramatic writer, having meanwhile made the acquaintanne of Moliere and Boileau. His first piece was the Freres Ennem is, played in 1604; but it was not till 1667, when his Andromaque appeared, that the power and pecu liar character of his genius excited marked attention. For the next ten years his career as a dramatist was unsurpassably brilliant, yet, strange to say, we know almost nothing of his private or social life during that time. We have to content ourselves with little more than a few Meager facts relative to his literary performances, the chief of which are Britannieus, Berenice, Bajazet, Mithridate, Iplagen:e, and Plied.re. Suddenly, at the early age of 38, in the full sunshine of his fame and vigor of his power. he resolved to abandon both the stage and the world, and become a Carthusian monk. The effect of his Port-Royal training was now seen. In the midst of all his literary ambitious and strifes, his little excesses, irregularities, and amours, Racine had carried with him a keen and faithful conscience; aml from disappointment, partly from remorse, he longed to forget all in acts of defotion. With difficulty he was prevailed upon to mod ify the rigor of his purpose, and instead of seeking for religious felicity through the pri vations of solitude, and the severities of penance, to do so through marriage with some pious woman, and the cultivation of domestic virtues. A suitable lady—very devout. but not very intelligent—was found for the poet in the daughter of the city-treasurer of Amiens, and the marriage took place in 1677. Seven children, two sons and five daugh ters. were the fruit of this union. Shortly after it, Racine was appointed historiographer to the king. Henceforth his course of life was pursued with the utmost regularity—one third of the day being given to God, another to his family and friends, and the remainder to the king. His Esther (1690) and iltludie (1691) are the only dramas which lie produced after his conversion, and they are profoundly imbued with religious feeling. Atladle is reckoned by sonic his finest effort, and certainly the only one which can at all be placed in comparison with it is the Piddre. The poet died, after a brief illness, on April 21, 1659.