His _Historia del famoso Predicador Fray Gerundio de Campazas, alias Zotes_ (1758), published by Isla under the name of his friend, Francisco Lobón de Salazar, parish priest of Aguilar and Villagarcía del Campo, is an attempt to do for pulpit profanity what _Don Quixote_ had done for chivalresque extravagances. It purports to be the story of a peasant-boy, Gerundio, with a natural faculty for clap-trap, which leads him to take orders, and gains for him no small consideration. A passage from the sermon which decided Gerundio's childish vocation may be quoted as typical:—"Fire, fire, fire! the house is a-flame! _Domus mea, domus orationis vocabitur_. Now, sacristan, peal those resounding bells: _in cymbalis bene sonantibus_. That's the style: as the judicious Picinelus observed, a death-knell and a fire-tocsin are just the same. _Lazarus amicus noster dormit_. Water, sirs, water! the earth is consumed—_quis dabit capiti meo aquam_.... Stay! what do I behold? Christians, alas! the souls of the faithful are a-fire!—_fidelium animæ_. Molten pitch feeds the hungry flames like tinder: _requiescat in pace, id est, in pice_, as Vetablus puts it. How God's fire devours! _ignis a Deo illatus_. Tidings of great joy! the Virgin of Mount Carmel descends to save those who wore her holy scapular: _scapulis suis_. Christ says: 'Help in the King's name!' The Virgin pronounceth: 'Grace be with me!' _Ave Maria._" And so forth at much length. Isla fails in his attempt to solder fast impossibilities, to amalgamate rhetorical doctrine with farcical burlesque; nor has his book the saving quality of style. Still, though it be too long drawn out, it abounds with an emphatic, violent humour which is almost irresistible at a first reading. The Second Part, published in 1770, is a work of supererogation. The First caused a furious controversy in which the regulars combined to throw mud at the Jesuits with such effect that, in 1760, the Holy Office intervened, confiscated the volume, and forbade all argument for or against it. Ridicule, however, did its work in surreptitious copies; so that when the author was expelled from Spain with the rest of his order in 1765, Fray Gerundio and his like were reformed characters. In 1787 Isla translated _Gil Blas_, under the impression that he was "restoring the book to its native land." The suggestion that Le Sage merely plagiarised a Spanish original is due in the first place to Voltaire, who made it, for spiteful reasons of his own, in the famous _Siècle de Louis XIV._ (1751). As some fifteen or twenty episodes are unquestionably borrowed from Espinel and others, it was not unnatural that Spaniards should (rather late in the day) take Voltaire at his word; none the less, the character of Gil Blas himself is as purely French as may be, and Le Sage vindicates his originality by his distinguished treatment of borrowed matter. Isla's version is a sound, if unnecessary, piece of work, spoiled by the inclusion of a