at he has been allowed here a place of greater consideration
than perhaps has ever fallen to his lot before in literary history.

Still, even putting out of sight the new developments which had shown
the irrepressible vitality of the French _conte_, the seven hundred
years had not been wasted. The product of the first half of them
remained, indeed, at this time sealed up in the "gazophile" of the older
age, or was popularised only by well-meaning misinterpreters like the
Comte de Tressan;[435] but the treasure-house was very soon to be broken
open and utilised. It is open to any one to contend--it is, indeed,
pretty much the opinion of the present writer--that it was this very
neglect which had made the progress of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries themselves so slow and so imperfect in its total results. For
those who like to look for literary causes outside literature, there may
be other explanations. But any intelligent reader can do something for
himself if he has the facts before him. It is these facts that it has
been and will be our business to give and to summarise here.

They have been given; let us attempt to summarise them in the briefest
possible way. France possibly did not invent Romance; no man or men
could do that; it was a sort of deferred heritage which Humankind, like
the Heir of Lynne, discovered when it was ready to hang itself (speaking
in terms of literature) during the Dark Ages. But she certainly grew the
seed for all other countries, and dispersed the growth to the ends of
the earth. Very much the same was the case with the short tale in the
"Middle" period. From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth (both
included) she entered upon a curious kind of wilderness, studded with
oases of a more curious character still. In one of them Rabelais was
born, and found Quintessence, and of that finding--more fortunate than
the result of True Thomas finding the Elf Queen--was born Pantagruelism.
In another came Lesage, and though his work was scarcely original, it
was consummate. None of these happy sojourns produced a _Don Quixote_ or
a _Tom Jones_, but divers smaller things resulted. And again and again,
as had happened in the Middle Ages themselves, but on a smaller scale,
what France did found development and improvement in other lands; while
her own miniature masterpieces, from the best of the _Cent Nouvelles
Nouvelles_ and the _Heptameron_, through all others that we noticed down
to _Adolphe