scattered traits of wit and knowledge of human nature which he sprinkles liberally over his work, and in the brisk and vigorous style wherein the book is written. This latter is the real charm of the _Diable Boiteux_. Lesage took something from La Rochefoucauld, something and perhaps more from St. Evremond, and, availing himself of the general improvement in French prose style which had resulted from the schoolmastering of the academic critics, from Balzac to Boileau, produced a mixture of singular pungency and elegance. Couched as the whole work is in the form of a lengthy dialogue between the demon and Don Cleofas, the author has availed himself of the characteristics of his characters in a sufficiently artful fashion. The petulance of the student never allows the good demon to engage uninterrupted in too long a narration, but constantly recalls him to this or that interesting incident, which makes a digression in the midst of the histories and prevents any feeling of _longueur_ from stealing on the reader. Now this is a feeling which the general plan of the French-Spanish _Roman d'Aventures_ adopted by Lesage was only too much calculated to produce. The pedigree of stories of this kind was a long one. They arose unquestionably, on the one hand, from the prose Greek romances to which the Byzantine period gave rise, and on the other from the incomparable romances of chivalry, to use the usual though rather indiscriminate term of which France must claim the invention. To do the _Chanson de Geste_, the oldest form of the latter variety, justice, digression was not among its faults. But from the first the Greek prose romance seems to have been liable to it, and from the date of the _Romans d'Aventures_, which express in a way the union of the two, it was a crying sin of the western romance, whether it was written in verse or in prose. Everything by degrees became sacrificed to length, and the easiest way of attaining length was by indulging in numerous episodic excursions. Moral disquisitions, personal panegyrics, sentimental discussions on points of amatory law, which the earlier seventeenth century had endured, were impossible at the time when Lesage wrote, and he confined himself solely to the story within a story which his English followers, Smollett and Fielding, adopted from him, and which lasted even to the days of Scott, with the advantage to literature of producing what is, perhaps, the best short tale in any language--Wandering Willie's legend in _Redgauntlet_. By that time, however, the necessity of connecting the digressions definitely and directly with the general story had forced itself on the consideration of the romancer. Lesage's age was less difficult, and his episodes might be cut out without damaging such central story as he has, but with a woful consequence to the total interest and attraction of the book. What saved _Le Diable Boiteux_ was, let it