part of the century, the example of La Fontaine, though he himself wrote in poetry, helped to recall the tale-tellers of France to an occupation more worthy of them, more suitable to the genius of the literature, and more likely to last. The reaction against the _Clelie_ school produced first Madame de Villedieu (Catherine Desjardins) (1632-1692), a fluent and facile novelist, who enjoyed great but not enduring popularity. The form which the prose tale took at this period was that of the fairy story. Perrault (1628-1703) and Madame d'Aulnoy (d. 1705) composed specimens of this kind which have never ceased to be popular since. Hamilton (1646-1720), the author of the well-known _Memoires du comte de Gramont_, wrote similar stories of extraordinary merit in style and ingenuity. There is yet a third class of prose writing which deserves to be mentioned. It also may probably be traced to Spanish influence, that is to say, to the picaresque romances which the 16th and 17th centuries produced in Spain in large numbers. The most remarkable example of this is the _Roman comique_ of the burlesque writer Scarron. The _Roman bourgeois_ of Antoine Furetiere (1619-1688) also deserves mention as a collection of pictures of the life of the time, arranged in the most desultory manner, but drawn with great vividness, observation and skill. A remarkable writer who had great influence on Moliere has also to be mentioned in this connexion rather than in any other. This is Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655), who, besides composing doubtful comedies and tragedies, writing political pamphlets, and exercising the task of literary criticism in objecting to Scarron's burlesques, produced in his _Histoires comiques des etats et empires de la lune et du soleil_, half romantic and half satirical compositions, in which some have seen the original of _Gulliver's Travels_, in which others have discovered only a not very successful imitation of Rabelais, and which, without attempting to decide these questions, may fairly be ranked in the same class of fiction with the masterpieces of Swift and Rabelais, though of course at an immense distance below them. One other work, and in literary influence perhaps the most remarkable of its kind in the century, remains. Madame de Lafayette, Marie de la Vergne (1634-1692), the friend of La Rochefoucauld and of Madame de Sevigne, though she did not exactly anticipate the modern novel, showed the way to it in her stories, the principal of which are _Zaide_ and still more La _Princesse de Cleves_. The latter, though a long way from _Manon Lescaut_, _Clarissa_, or _Tom Jones_, is a longer way still from _Polexandre_ or the _Arcadia_. The novel becomes in it no longer a more or less fictitious chronicle, but an attempt at least at the display of character. _La Princesse de Cleves_ has never been one of the works widely popular out of their own country, nor perhaps does it deserve such popularity, for it has more