This brings us to the consideration of a point of very great importance--the style of Lesage. In all such cases the modern reader who merely looks back is very likely to be deceived by his point of view. Yet even the modern reader, if he has but some notion of the date of his author, must, I should think, be conscious of a singular modernness in _Gil Blas_ and the _Diable Boiteux_ compared with Bossuet, Fénelon, even Malebranche, and still more with Madame de Sévigné and Saint-Simon. Lesage, indeed, was one of a line of great writers chiefly of the lighter kind, who, perhaps, did most of any of their contemporaries to shape French style, as it has been generally understood until recently. Saint-Evremond and Pascal are the earliest of these, and Lesage, taking up the torch, handed it on to Voltaire. It is noteworthy that Voltaire, perhaps on the principle of kicking down his ladders, was unjust both to Saint-Evremond and to Lesage, though, as has been said, the latter had certainly provoked him. The great distinction of Lesage is the extreme ease of his writing and the manner in which his good things, such as those already cited above, drop naturally out in the midst of his narrative or dialogue, without any effort or apparent leading up. It would demand a much greater acquaintance with Spanish literature than any to which I, even at second-hand, can pretend, to decide whether his studies had anything to do with this; but I think that it may be tolerably safely assumed that they had not, except by way of contrast; for many, if not most, of the works which Lesage translated or followed were written in the extremest _gongorist_ or conceited style--a style as remote from his as Lyly's from Steele's. It may possibly be contended that it was in fighting against this excess that Lesage learnt the secret of a wise economy. Certainly, there are not merely few writers in whom there is so little archaism, affectation, mannerism, or deliberate oddity and obscurity, but also few in whom the style is so absolutely plain and unadorned, without being in the least vulgar, or, in the unfavourable sense, homely. His autobiographies, probably owing to this, have, more than most autobiographies, the air of being really told by a speaker and not elaborated in the study. There are no ponderous sentences, no phrases over which the reader sees that the pen has hung a long time, and, as has been already noted, none of the leading-up and preparation which certain witty writers are unable to avoid or to conceal. The most commonplace things are said with perfect simplicity, and yet, somehow or other, in a way on which it is impossible to improve. It must be a bold man who thinks he can better a saying of Lesage's, and that not because of any _tour de force_ of unusual phrase or out-of-the-way thought, but, on the contrary, because the simplicity has reached the lowest term. Nothing can be taken away, and nothing can be added that is not a useless addition.