should find that the Spanish language was an Open Sesame to an Ali Baba's cave of opulent invention. Just as a hundred forgotten trouveurs chanted the tales of the _Morte Darthur_, before Malory made from their songs the epic that we know, so the rogue novel had seeded and repeated itself again and again, before it met its great man who seized the vitality of a hundred bantlings to make a breeched book. [Illustration: ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE] [Its culmination in Le Sage.] Just as Malory was not a Frenchman but an Englishman, so Le Sage was not a Spaniard but a Frenchman, and a Frenchman in a very different age from that which produced his models. The 'Stately Spanish galleons Sailing from the Isthmus, Dipping through the tropics by the palm green shores, With cargoes of diamonds, Emeralds, amethysts, Topazes and cinnamon and gold moidores,'[5] no longer brought the wealth of the Incas to Cadiz and Barcelona, but had been burnt as firewood in the cabins on the Irish coast. The Elizabethan age had come and gone. Cervantes had been dead a hundred years. Molière had brought comedy to the French stage. Watteau was painting, and Boileau was formulating the eighteenth-century code of letters, when in a little garden summer-house behind a Paris street, Le Sage sat at his desk, dipped through Spanish books, and wrote with a light heart of the people that he knew, disguised in foreign clothes, and moving in places he had never seen. He made his travels by his own fireside, and the contrast between Cervantes' active life and his peaceable _Galatea_ is no greater than that between the adventurous Gil Blas and Le Sage's sedentary industry. His lack of personal experience left him very free in the handling of his material, and made him just the man to recast the old adventures of a century before, to translate them, spilling none of their vitality, to a later time, to fill them out with a more delicate fancy, to finish them with a more fastidious pen, and to build from them a new and delicious French book, Spanish in colouring, but wholly Parisian in appeal.