In the controversies which have arisen about Lesage's greatest work it is not very difficult to find a satisfactory explanation of his great and peculiar value. For the Spanish claim--absolutely unsupported as it is by one tittle of external evidence, and, indeed, as we may almost say, completely as it is rebutted by all such evidence--rests in reality on an expressed or understood idea that no one but a native writer could have so dealt with Spain and Spaniards. The retort to the charge is as instructive as the charge itself. Frenchmen appeal to Germans, Englishmen, and other foreigners to decide the cause, and the referees give their decision in a manner which is decisive. _Gil Blas_, they say, is not specially a Spaniard, though the art of his creator has dressed him up marvellously in the habits, garments and speech of Spain. He is simply a man, and the accuracy with which the author has hit the universal beneath the particular would have equally enabled him, had he chosen, to draw an Englishman or a German, and would have entitled Englishmen or Germans, had they been sufficiently shortsighted, to claim his work as borrowed or stolen from an English or German original. The reply is unanswerable, and the more one reads Lesage the more convinced one is of the sufficiency of it and the more proof one finds of its truth. It is in this quality of universality, of striking at the essential humanity of men and dealing with their accidental nationality only in such manner as might suit his purpose that Lesage's great genius consists, and in this quality he is, as it seems to me, at the head of all French writers, and only second to Shakspeare. Of course the range of the two is very different, it is even hardly commensurable. Lesage had his faculty at complete command within certain very restricted limits, but beyond those limits he was not in the least master of it, indeed it can hardly be said that he endeavoured to show it at all. Whether his thorough and comparatively early steeping in one peculiar and extremely artificial kind of literature--the picaroon romances and intrigue-dramas of Spain--narrowed his mind at the same time that it sharpened it is a question rather of psychology than of literature; but it is certain that he shows very little tendency to wander out of his own narrow circle, and that when he does so he becomes merely an ordinary man of letters, possessed of a pleasant wit and of a ready and skilful pen. But within his circle he hardly yields to the master himself. Indeed, Gil Blas may hold up his head in any company, even in the company of Shakspeare's children. There is the same invariable consistency, the same total absence of false notes, the same completeness of presentation. It was in this latter that Lesage differed most from his countrymen. The fatal doctrine of the ruling passion had made but little impression upon him. In drawing Gil Blas he has not an abstraction of intrigue and courtiership of the lower