he is clad as
Omphale clad Hercules, and set to work. If he tries and fails, he is to
be flayed alive and burnt. Facardin, to the despair of his secretary,
enters--beguiled by a black ambassadress, who merely informs him that a
lady wants help--the enchanted boat which takes him to the fatal scene.
But when he is to be introduced to the lady he entirely declines to part
with his sword; and when the whole secret is revealed he, with the help
of Cristalline, who is really a good-natured creature in more senses
than one, slays the three chief minions of the tyrant--a watchmaker who
sets the clock, a locksmith who is to count the detached rings, and a
kind of Executioner High-priest who is to do the flaying and
burning,--cuts his way with Cristalline herself to the enchanted boat,
regaining _terra firma_ and (relatively speaking) _terra_ not too much
enchanted. But at his very landing at the mouth of the crocodile river
he again meets Facardin of the Mountain (who has figured in
Cristalline's history earlier) with the two others, whose stories we
shall never hear; and is told about Mousseline; whereat we and the tale
"join our ends" as far as is permitted.

It would be easy to pick from this story alone a sort of nosegay of
Hamiltonisms like that from Fuller, which Charles Lamb selected so
convincingly that some have thought them simply invented. But it would
be unjust to Anthony, because, unless each was given in a _matrix_ of
context, nobody could, in most cases at any rate, do justice to this
curious glancing genius of his. It exists in Sydney Smith to some
extent--in Thackeray to more--among Englishmen. There is, in French,
something of it in Lesage, who possibly learnt it directly from him; and
of course a good deal, though of a lower kind, in Voltaire, who
certainly did learn it from him. But it is, with that slight
indebtedness to Saint-Evremond noticed above, essentially new and
original. It is a mixture of English-Irish (that is to say,
Anglo-Norman) humour with French wit, almost unattainable at that day
except by a man who, in addition to his natural gifts, had the mixed
advantages and disadvantages of his exile position.

Frenchmen at the time--there is abundance, not of mere anecdote, but of
solid evidence to prove it--knew practically nothing of English
literature. Englishmen knew a good deal more of French, and imitated and
translated it, sometimes more eagerly than wisely. But they had not as
yet assimila