Tartarin is as true as Numa Roumestan; in fact they may almost be said to be sketched from the same model but in a very different temper. In "Numa Roumestan" we are shown the sober side of the Southern temperament, the sorrow it brings in the house though it displays joy in the street; and in "Tartarin" we behold only the immense comicality of the incessant incongruity between the word and the deed. Tartarin is Southern, it is true, and French; but he is very human also. There is a boaster and a liar in most of us, lying in wait for a chance to rush out and put us to shame. It is this universality of Daudet's satire that has given Tartarin its vogue on both sides of the Atlantic. The ingenuity of Tartarin's misadventures, the variety of them in Algiers and in Switzerland, the obvious reasonableness of them all, the delightful probability of these impossibilities, the frank gaiety and the unflagging high spirits,--these are precious qualities, all of them; but it is rather the essential humanness of Tartarin himself that has given him a reputation throughout the world. Very rarely indeed now or in the past has an author been lucky enough to add a single figure to the cosmopolitan gallery of fiction. Cervantes, De Foe, Swift, Le Sage, Dumas, have done it; Fielding and Hawthorne and Turgenef have not. It is no wonder that Daudet takes pride in this. The real joy of the novelist, he declares, is to create human beings, to put on their feet types of humanity who thereafter circulate through the world with the name, the gesture, the grimace he has given them and who are cited and talked about without reference to their creator and without even any mention of him. And whenever Daudet heard some puppet of politics or literature called a Tartarin, a shiver ran through him--"the shiver of pride of a father, hidden in the crowd that is applauding his son and wanting all the time to cry out 'That's my boy!'" V. The time has not yet come for a final estimate of Daudet's position,--if a time ever arrives when any estimate can be final. But already has a selection been made of the masterpieces which survive, and from which an author is judged by the next generation that will have time to criticise only the most famous of the works this generation leaves behind it. We can see also that much of Daudet's later writing is slight and not up to his own high standard, although even his briefest trifle had always something of his charm, of his magic, of his seductive grace. We can see how rare an endowment he has when we note that he is an acute observer of mankind, and yet without any taint of misanthropy, and that he combines fidelity of reproduction with poetic elevation.