It would be hard, we think, to overmatch anywhere in literature the shrewd but genial satire, the quiet, effective comedy, of the foregoing. How deep it gently goes, probing and searching into the secret springs of our common human nature! The cool, the frontless calculation of self-interest on Gil Blas's part throughout the whole course of his conduct of the relation between himself and the archbishop is perfectly characteristic of the impudent easy-heartedness everywhere displayed of this conscienceless adventurer. It illustrates the consummate art of the author that the whole is so managed that, while you do not sympathize with his hero, you still are by no means forced to feel unplesantly offended at him. This is a great feat of lullaby to the conscience of the reader; for the character of the work is such that if, in perusing it, you should throughout keep vigilantly obeying the wholesome safeguard injunction of the apostle, "Abhor that which is evil," you would be so busy doing the duty of abhorring as seriously to interfere with your enjoyment of the comedy. To get the pleasure or the profit, and at the same time leave the taint, that is the problem often in studying the masterpieces of literature. As generally, so in the case of "Gil Blas," it is a problem perhaps best to be solved by being still more intent on leaving the taint than on getting the pleasure or the profit. On the whole, the reading of "Gil Blas" entire is a task or a diversion that may safely in most cases be postponed to the leisure of late life. The whole is such, or is not so good, as the part that has here been shown. It is an instance in which the building is very fairly represented by a single specimen brick. Multiply what you have seen by the necessary factor, and you have the total product with little or no loss. It ought to be added that "Gil Blas," as in local color and in what might be styled medium not French at all, is also in general character the least French of French productions. It seems almost as if expressly written to be part of what Goethe taught his disciples to look for, namely, a "world-literature." "Gil Blas," though French in form, is in essence French only because it is human. And for the same reason it is of every other nation as well. It possesses, therefore, as French literature a unique and, so to speak, paradoxical importance in not being French literature; it is, in fact, perhaps quite the only French book that is less national than universal. XV. MONTESQUIEU: 1689-1755; DE TOCQUEVILLE: 1805-1859. To Montesquieu belongs the glory of being the founder, or inventor, of the philosophy of history. Bossuet might dispute this palm with him; but Bossuet, in his "Discourse on Universal History," only exemplified the principle which it was left to Montesquieu afterward more consciously to develop.