youthfulness in the matter of the Archbishop of Granada--has passed into general knowledge. I shall only say that it is perhaps the very happiest holding up of a mirror to one particular weak place of human nature that I know. Few people perhaps, save reviewers, who are in continual receipt of expostulations from the reviewed, know how eternal is the verity of the presentment. By some unhappy fortune the particular stanza of the poem, the particular chapter of the novel, the particular juncture of the plot, which the critic happens to blame is the very thing that is best in the book. "On n'a jamais composé de meilleur homélie que celle qui a le malheur de n'avoir pas notre approbation." This is only an illustration of the supreme merit of the book--its absolute truth to Nature. But another illustration may, perhaps, be pardonably given. It has been said, or hinted, that in the last two volumes Gil Blas is a much better as well as a much less ridiculous personage than he is in the first--this is especially the case in the last. Prosperity, age, the absence of temptation, account for this. But Lesage's unpitying, because absolutely veracious, talent would not suffer him to turn his intriguing fortune-hunter into a saint. The ugly episode of the journey to Toledo, in which the admired minister Olivarez and the respectable reformed rake Gil Blas play such awkward parts, is an instance of the truth which is put in the homely phrase Defoe loved--"What is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh." Now-a-days, perhaps, when the naturalist school, in its scorn of the namby-pamby, rushes into the opposite extreme and will have nothing but vice and ugliness, such a book as _Gil Blas_ is infinitely more instructive, as well as more refreshing to read, than all the rose-pink pictures of impossible virtues and all the half-told tales of life with the dark side of it kept out of sight that literature can muster. It will scarcely be pretended by any brisk young novelist of the nineteenth century that he has more insight than Lesage, scarcely, either, that Lesage was afraid to say what occurred to him or that his literary vocabulary and general equipment were unequal to the task. Yet here is a book as free from cant or from taint of the _hérésie de l'enseignement_ as any one can desire, and which yet leaves no bad taste in the mouth, meddles with no abnormal crimes, and suggests as a total reflexion not merely that all's well that ends well, but that in most cases with fair luck all does end fairly well.