be once more repeated, the smartness of the satire, the acuteness of the observation of life, and the pure fluent style in which the whole was embodied. The one means which has always been able to move a French audience or body of readers has been the untranslatable _malice_; and Lesage possessed the secret of this in an eminent degree. But he had more than this--he had also the faculty of informing his malicious side-hits at human nature, with a certain breadth and truth in which Voltaire himself fails except when he is at his very best, and of never going out of his way for a gibe, a mistake only too common among French authors. The fantastic setting; the absence of any attempt to get into the pulpit and preach, while a certain subtle under-flavour of moralizing reconciled the most moralizing of all centuries; the urbanity of the style, and the allusions, artfully scattered here and there, to personal adventures and personal gossip, were quite sufficient to attract contemporaries. That the popularity of the _Diable Boiteux_ has been more than ephemeral shows--let us repeat it, for it cannot be too often repeated--that observation of Nature, enbalmed with due preparation of art, is never likely to lose its hold upon men; if it were, adieu to literature. The good qualities of _Turcaret_ and the _Diable Boiteux_ appeared in far more striking measure and co-ordinated far more skilfully in the great work which these volumes present once more to the reader in the version of the greatest but one of Lesage's followers. Of the general merits of _Gil Blas_ it is necessary to say very little. Nor is it necessary to add in this particular place anything to what has been said and will be said of the comparatively half-hearted estimation in which his countrymen have held the writer of this masterpiece. In French histories of literature Lesage holds but a subordinate place, and he is sometimes treated as second in the race to Defoe, though it is hardly necessary to say that the first and best of the great Englishman's romances is younger than _Gil Blas_ by nearly five years. Argument and abstract are equally superfluous. How _Gil Blas_ left his scarcely-unwilling kin, how he learnt by bitter experience not to trust too much to flatterers, how he fell among thieves, among the minions of the law, among actors (on whom Lesage took a terrible vengeance in this book for the treatment they had accorded to him), even those to whom the pleasure--_pace_ Mr. James Payn--of reading our book is yet to come, know, in virtue of a thousand quotations and allusions in every kind of literature. Of the latter parts of the book, which show in the author some such an idea as that by which Dickens, either before or after the fact, excused the transformation of Mr. Pickwick's character, perhaps less is known by those who have not actually read it. Only one episode--the famous and, indeed, immortal relapse of _Gil Blas_ into