not merely drawn upon, but improved upon, for curious anecdotes,
striking situations, effective names. Under the latter heads it is
noteworthy that Gautier simply "lifted" the name Sigognac from Scarron,
though he attached it to a very different personage; and that Dumas got,
from the same source, the startling incident of Aramis suddenly
descending on the crupper of D'Artagnan's horse. The jokes may, of
course, amuse or not different persons, and even different moods of the
same person; the practical ones, as has been hinted, may pall, even when
they are not merely vulgar. Practical joking had a long hold of
literature, as of life; and it would be sanguine to think that it is
dead. Izaak Walton, a curious contemporary--"disparate," as the French
say, of Scarron, would not quite have liked the quarrel between the
dying inn-keeper, who insists on being buried in his oldest sheet, full
of holes and stains, and his wife, who asks him, from a sense rather of
decency than of affection, how he can possibly think of appearing thus
clad in the Valley of Jehoshaphat? But there is something in the book
for many tastes, and a good deal more for the student of the history of
the novel.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Furetiere and the _Roman Bourgeois_.]

The couplet-contrast of the Comic Romance of Scarron and the "Bourgeois"
Romance of Furetiere[257] is one of the most curious among the minor
phenomena of literary history; but it repeats itself in that history so
often that it becomes, by accumulation, hardly minor. There is a vast
difference between Furetiere and Miss Austen, and a still vaster one
between Scarron and Scott; but the two French books stand to each other,
on however much lower a step of the stair, very much as _Waverley_
stands to _Pride and Prejudice_, and they carry on a common revulsion
against their forerunners and a common quest for newer and better
developments. The _Roman Bourgeois_, indeed, is more definitely, more
explicitly, and in further ways of exodus, a departure from the subjects
and treatment of most of the books noticed in the last chapter. It is
true that its author attributes to the reading of the regular romances
the conversion of his pretty idiot Javotte from a mere idiot to
something that can, at any rate, hold her own in conversation, and take
an interest in life.[258] But he also adds the consequence of her
elopement, without apparently any prospect of marriage, but