ngs after the new day,
like the noble author of the _Solitaire_ who will follow them. They are,
in fact, the minors of the class in which Pigault-Lebrun earlier and
Paul de Kock later represent such "majority" as it possesses. But they
ought not to be neglected here: and I am bound to say that the very
considerable trouble they cost me has not been wholly vain.[66] The
most noted of the whole group, and one of the earliest, Ducray-Duminil's
_Lolotte et Fanfan_, escaped[67] a long search; but the possession and
careful study of the four volumes of his _Petit Carillonneur_ (1819)
has, I think, enabled me to form a pretty clear notion of what not
merely _Lolotte_ (the second title of which is _Histoire de Deux Enfants
abandonnes dans une ile deserte_), but _Victor ou L'Enfant de la Foret_,
_Caelina ou L'Enfant du Mystere_, _Jules ou le Toit paternel_, or any
other of the author's score or so of novels would be like.

The book, I confess, was rather hard to read at first, for
Ducray-Duminil is a sort of Pigault-Lebrun _des enfants_; he writes
rather kitchen French; the historic present (as in all these books)
loses its one excuse by the wearisome abundance of it, and the first
hundred pages (in which little Dominique, having been unceremoniously
tumbled out of a cabriolet[68] by wicked men, and left to the chances of
divine and human assistance, is made to earn his living by
framed-bell-ringing in the streets of Paris) became something of a
_corvee_. But the author is really a sort of deacon, though in no high
division of his craft. He expands and duplicates his situations with no
inconsiderable cunning, and the way in which new friends, new enemies,
and new should-be-indifferent persons are perpetually trying to find out
whether the boy is really the Dominique d'Alinvil of Marseilles, whose
father and mother have been foully made away with, or not, shows command
of its own particular kind of ingenuity. Intrigues of all sorts--violent
and other (for his wicked relative, the Comtesse d'Alinvil, is always
trying to play Potiphar's wife to him, and there is a certain
Mademoiselle Gothon who would not figure as she does here in a book by
Mr. Thomas Day)--beset him constantly; he is induced not merely to
trust his enemies, but to distrust his friends; there is a good deal of
underground work and of the explained supernatural; a benevolent
musician; an excellent cure; a rather "coming" but agreeable Adrienne de
Surval, who, close