when persons he disliked were his interlocutors, though it went up readily enough when any one he liked approached. This is the last and one of the very few personal pieces of gossip we have about him, and it proves satisfactorily that a hard worker and a great benefactor of his species, who had not in his time enjoyed too many of the gifts of fortune, at any rate passed his last years in peace and in such comfort as might be. His wife outlived him but a very short time and died at the age of eighty. If an author is to be judged only by those works whose popularity has stood the test of time, Lesage need only be considered as the author of _Crispin Rival de son Maître_, of _Turcaret_, of _Le Diable Boiteux_, and of _Gil Blas de Santillane_. His other prose works are, indeed, of considerable bulk, but they are for the most part distinguished by the merits of the more celebrated pieces in a less prominent, and by the faults in a more prominent, degree. His _Guzman d'Alfarache_ is chiefly interesting as a specimen of extremely skilful _remaniement_, a process more often applied in modern times to dramatic work than to prose fiction, and which, perhaps, in the case of prose fiction, has never been so well managed as here. _M. de Beauchêne_ has, as has been already mentioned, some interesting points of resemblance to the methods of Defoe. _Le Bachelier de Salamangue_ has a certain interest, because of its connection with the theory or hypothesis of a lost Spanish original of _Gil Blas_. If Lesage himself may be trusted, there was certainly such an original in the case of the _Bachelor_, and one of the many suppositions tending to deprive him of the credit of his greatest work supposes that both were extracted or rehandled from the same work. _Estévanille Gonzales_ is, perhaps, the least attractive of all, while it is also one of the least original, and the translations from the Italian, &c., need not delay us. Among the minor works the chief are:--first, a lively and well-written little dialogue, called _Une Journée des Parques_, which has had the luck to be oftener reprinted than most of Lesage's _opuscula_; secondly, the already-mentioned collection of imaginary letters called _La Valise Trouvée_; and, lastly, the collection of anecdotes which was the author's last work and which was not published until after his death. Of Lesage, however, it is truer than of most writers, that he is best seen in his best work. His pot-boilers usually have something of his easy style and much of his pleasant subacid wit, but they fail, as a rule, to show the power of truthful character-drawing which was his greatest merit, and their wit itself degenerates into mere smartness more frequently than could be wished.