al, Lucian, Martial; try the modern satirists of all kinds, and you
will always find these secondary sources of enjoyment present.

There is hardly one of them--if one--to be found in _L'Education
Sentimentale_. It is simply a panorama of human folly, frailty,
feebleness, and failure--never permitted to rise to any great heights or
to sink to any infernal depths, but always maintained at a probable
human level. We start with Frederic Moreau as he leaves school at the
correct age of eighteen. I am not sure at what actual age we leave him,
though it is at some point or other of middle life, the most active part
of the book filling about a decade. But "vanity is the end of all his
ways," and vanity has been the beginning and middle of them--a perfectly
quiet and everyday kind of vanity, but vain from centre to
circumference and entire surface. He (one cannot exactly say
"tries," but) is brought into the possibility of trying love
of various kinds--illegitimate-romantic, legitimate-not-unromantic,
illegitimate-professional but not disagreeable, illegitimate-conventional.
Nothing ever "comes off" in a really satisfactory fashion. He is
"exposed" (in the photographic-plate sense) to all, or nearly all, the
influences of a young man's life in Paris--law, literature, art,
insufficient means, quite sufficient means, society, politics--including
the Revolution of 1848--enchantments, disenchantments--_tout ce qu'il
faut pour vivre_--to alter a little that stock expression for "writing
materials" which is so common in French. But he never can get any real
"life" out of any of these things. He is neither a fool, nor a cad, nor
anything discreditable or disagreeable. He is "only an or'nary person,"
to reach the rhythm of the original by adopting a slang form in not
quite the slang sense. And perhaps it is not unnatural that other
ordinary persons should find him too faithful to their type to be
welcome. In this respect at least I may claim not to be ordinary. One
goes down so many empty wells, or wells with mere rubbish at the bottom
of them, that to find Truth at last is to be happy with her (without
prejudice to the convenience of another well or two here and there, with
an agreeable Falsehood waiting for one). I do not know that _L'Education
Sentimentale_ is a book to be read very often; one has the substance in
one's own experience, and in the contemplation of other people's, too
readily at hand for that to be necessary or perhaps