reflect the actual manners of the time) remain, such as the obligatory
"compliment." Le Destin is ready to hang himself because, at his first
meeting with the beautiful Leonore, his shyness prevents his getting a
proper "compliment" out. On the other hand, the demand for _esprit_,
which was confined in the Heroics to a few privileged characters, now
becomes almost universal. There are tricks, but fairly novel
tricks--affectations like "I don't know what they did next" and the
others noted above: while the famous rhetorical beginnings of chapters
appear not only at the very outset, but at the opening of the second
volume, "Le Soleil donnant aplomb sur les antipodes,"--things which a
century later Fielding, and two centuries later Dickens, did not disdain
to imitate.

Scarron did not live to finish the book, and the third part or volume,
which was tinkered--still more the _Suite_, which was added--by somebody
else, are very inferior. The somewhat unfavourable opinions referred to
above may be partly based on the undoubted fact that the story is rather
formless; that its most important machinery is dependent, after all, on
the old _rapt_ or abduction, the heroines of which are Mademoiselle de
l'Etoile (nominally Le Destin's sister, really his love, and at the end
his wife) and Angelique, daughter of La Caverne, who is provided with a
lover and husband of 12,000 (_livres_) a year in the person of Leandre,
one of the stock theatrical names, professedly "valet" to Le Destin, but
really a country gentleman's son. Thus everybody is somebody else, again
in the old way. Another, and to some tastes a more serious, blot may be
found in the everlasting practical jokes of the knock-about kind,
inflicted on the unfortunate Ragotin, a sort of amateur member of the
troupe. But again these "_low_ jinks" were an obvious reaction from
(just as the ceremonies were followings of) the solemnity of the
Heroics; and they continued to be popular for nearly two hundred years,
as English readers full well do know. Nevertheless these defects merely
accompany--they do not mar or still less destroy--the striking
characteristics of progress which appear with them, and which, without
any elaborate abstract of the book, have been set forth somewhat
carefully in the preceding pages. Above all, there is a real and
considerable attempt at character, a trifle _typy_ and stagy perhaps,
but still aiming at something better; and the older _nouvelle_-fashion
is