daughter, and his marriage can hardly have added to the young lawyer's resources. Falling in with an old schoolfellow, Danchet, who had already made some mark in literature, he was recommended by him to seek the same refuge for the destitute. His _coup d'essai_, a translation of the letters of Aristænetus, which appeared in 1695 (he had been married in August or September, 1694), has made his biographers and critics rather merry. He certainly might have done better, but it is doubtful whether the oddity of the choice--comparatively worthless as the book is--struck that age as it strikes ours. The indiscriminate reign of the classics, early and late, good and bad, genuine and spurious, was not yet over, and many a young man of letters had made his _début_ with work not intrinsically better. Lesage, however, had no luck--he had not much at any period during his life--and the book fell flat. A more useful adviser in every sense, however, fell to his lot in the person of the Abbe de Lyonne. Lyonne not merely gave him, or procured him, a pension or annuity of six hundred livres--no despicable assistance to modest housekeeping at that time, when living at Paris was extraordinarily cheap--but recommended him to study Spanish literature, of which he himself was a great lover. Three-quarters of a century before, this literature had been greatly admired and largely borrowed from in France, but the age of the great writers of Louis the Thirteenth's time and his son's had put it out of fashion. Lesage began by simple translation or adaptation, and, as in the case of Aristænetus, he was not too fortunate in his models. In drama, at least, he did not go far wrong, choosing Rojas, Lope de Vega and Calderon for his originals, and producing plays which were sometimes acted. But a version of the worthless _New Don Quixote_ of Avellaneda was sorry work for the future author of _Gil Blas_. The play which he conveyed from Calderon--_Don César Ursin_--had some merit; and in 1707, being then hard upon his fortieth year, he scored two great successes. His little piece of _Crispin Rival de son Maître_ appeared, and was loudly and deservedly applauded, while the _Diable_ obtained still greater favour. It ran through several editions in the year, and many legends of the usual character we told about its success. The most characteristic, and probably the truest, is that Boileau found his footboy with a copy, and declared that if such a book stayed a night in his house the boy should not stay another. Lesage was already hailed as a Molière Redivivus, and this of itself was sufficient to irritate Boileau in his sour old age. But it would probably have been sufficient for that vigorous but narrow critic that the book was not in any style which he had himself recommended, or which he could understand; for Boileau was the incarnation of the merely French spirit of literature in its most contracted form; Lesage, as we shall see, was not specially or