It would be pleasant here to digress into speculation why in our literature there should be so few rogues portrayed full-length; and why America, that in daily life derives such naïve pleasure from being cheated by "fine business men" and "far-seeing statesmen" should have produced in its writings no really memorable rogue, with the possible exception of Uncle Remus's Br'er Rabbit. But upon the whole, it appears preferable to say that Tyl Ulenspiegel has been for some five centuries famous among the people of Belgium and the Netherlands as a sort of Dutch Figaro or Scapin,--as "mischief-maker, jack-of-all-trades, and by turns fool, artist, valet and physician." This character was appropriated and ennobled by Charles de Coster as the central figure of a heroic romance, _La Légende de Tiel Uylenspiegel_, published in 1867, and since known as "the Bible of the Flemings"; and it is this book which was, some fifty years afterward, translated into our tongue. So much it appears preferable to say as simply as possible, because, in Geoffrey Whitworth's translation, a splendid and great-hearted example of literary art was then rendered into delightfully adequate English: and I incline to think that a masterpiece should be greeted simply and reverently, and without vain speaking. Even to recommend it to your consideration (as I none the less must conscientiously do) seems rather on a par with saying pleasant things about a sunrise. So honest comment can but come back to this: for Tyl Ulenspiegel himself one straightway establishes a sort of personal liking, a liking unbased on "literary" values, and an unmoralizing liking such as entraps you into indignation when the reforming Henry the Fifth repudiates that other not-unlovable rogue, Sir John Falstaff. "A Fleming am I from the lovely land of Flanders, workingman, nobleman, all in one,--and I go wandering through the world, praising things beautiful and good, but boldly making fun of foolishness." Such is Tyl Ulenspiegel's description of himself, in terms a bit over-modestly incommensurate to the speaker's variousness. Tyl can, for example, be upon occasion a very pretty fighting-man, performing salutary homicides with an approach to professional despatch and thoroughness. For so often as a national hero finds a deserving person to be rescued from oppression, ten or twelve adversaries amount, as we sometimes discontentedly foreknow, to nothing more than to afford, in the moment that their presumption procures for them demolishment, yet another proof of the foolishness of the wicked; and all such slight battues the national hero regards as trifles. Thus here, for serious work, an Ulenspiegel too requires some three or four fully armed opposing cohorts of Spanish cavalry to be discomfited single-handed, and really to justify a display of that animation with which Sieur Roland laid about him at Roncesvaux, and which enabled Achilles to choke Scamander with slain Trojans.