He has the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Fontenelle, Marmontel, Voiture; he has the plays of Brueys, La Chaussée, Dancourt, Destouches; he has many of the madrigalists and minor verse-men,--all of which possessions tend to corroborate that suspected close study of Gallic authors from which, as many hold, he derived not a little of the unfailing perspicuity of his prose, and most of the brightness and vivacity of his more familiar verse. Of his own works--and the fact is curious when one remembers some of his traditional characteristics--there are practically no examples, at least there is none catalogued. Their sole representative is an imperfect set of the 'History of the Earth and Animated Nature,' which had only recently been completed, and was published posthumously. Not a single copy of 'The Vicar,' of 'She Stoops to Conquer,' of 'The Citizen of the World,' of 'The Deserted Village'! Not even a copy of that rarest of rarities, the privately printed version of 'Edwin and Angelina,' which its author told his friend Cradock 'could not be amended'--although he was always amending it! Of course it is possible that his own writings had been withdrawn from Mr. Good's catalogue, or that they are included in the 'and others' of unspecified lots. But this is scarcely likely, and it may be accepted as a noteworthy fact that one of the most popular authors of his day did not, at his death, possess any of his own performances, with the exception of an incomplete specimen of his most laborious compilation.* * Racine was in similar case. In the inventory of his effects, discovered some time since, there is not a single copy of his works. Besides this, the only volumes that bear indirectly upon his work are the 'Memoirs' of the Cardinal de Retz, which he had used in 'The Bee,' the 'Lettres Persanes' of Montesquieu, which perhaps prompted 'The Citizen of the World,' and the 'Roman Comique' of M. Paul Scarron, which he had been translating in the latter months of its life--an accident which has left its mark in his last poem, the admirable 'Retaliation':= ```'Of old, when Scarron his companions invited, ``Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united.'= It may be that he had intended to prefix a biographical sketch or memoir to his version of the 'Comic Romance,' since the reference here is plainly to those famous picnic suppers in the Marais, to which, according to Scarron's biographer, M. Charles Baumet, came as guests--but * '_chacun apportant son plat_'--the pink of dames, of courtiers, and of men of letters.