For the work of the last four centuries, and for what, about 1450, remained undamaged of the earlier work, as well as for what has since been found in the dustbins, printing has proved a memorable blessing. We are not obliged to accept the opinions of the past. The books are there, and whether they be common or rare, we can find and read them. We are the startled and clement judges of the glory and of the obloquy that Boileau distributed to his contemporaries. Martial dishonoured poets who were perhaps a Saint Amant or a Scudéry; but we have beneath our eyes the documents composing the _dossier_ of the _Satires_, and no professor friendly to good morals and eternal principles can make us share his commonplace hatreds. A witty writer has remarked that Boileau treated the writers whom he disliked almost the way we treat convicted assassins or seducers of little girls; but, thanks to the unforeseen permanence of books, this ancient abuse matters no more for the judges to-day than a lawyer's vituperation. I have Sanlecque within hand's reach, even Cotin, even Coras. If they are poor writers, I shall say so only as a result of my own personal impression. A catalogue of lost books has been compiled.[5] Their number reaches five or six hundred, and to attain even this figure, the author was obliged to count some works which have merely strayed, as well as several editions of works reprinted more than once. Were there, among these lost books, any pages really worth crying over? It is hardly likely, judging from the epitaphs of these tombs. The following were doubtless neither other _Maximes_, nor other _Phèdres_, nor even other _Alarics_: _Herménégilde_, tragedy, by Gaspard Olivier (1601); the _Poétiques Trophées_, by Jean Figon de Montélimard (1556), or the _Courtisan Amoureux_ (1582) or the _Friant Dessert des Femmes mondaines_ (1643). But who knows? However, the _Coupe-Cul des Moines_, or the _Seringue spirituelle_, inspires but feeble regrets, and it is the same with the _Estranges et espouvantables Amours d'un diable déguisé en gentil-homme et d'une demoiselle de Bretagne_. A more palpable loss is that of several _Almanachs_ prepared by Rabelais, but even this does not matter so very much. The fact that feverish fingers wore out the first editions of _Astrée_, of the _Aventures du baron de Fœneste_, of the _Odes_ of Ronsard prematurely,[6] proves nothing but the immediate success of these works which do not cease to be in the hands of all connoisseurs for more than half a century, and the same might be said of the original editions of the first novels of Alexandre Dumas, which cannot be classed, for the most part, among lost books. But the fact that we can still read the inscriptions in a cemetery proves, at least, that those buried beneath them had a name and a fame, however transitory. The real lost books are those whose very titles to-day could be suspected by nobody. This anonymous dust would