ith a few exceptions, are
extremely short, in fact little more than anecdotes. The power and
attraction of the book lie simply in the crispness of the style, the
ease and flow of the narrative, and the unfailing satiric knowledge of
human nature which animates the whole. As it stands, it is double its
original length; for Lesage, finding it popular, and never being under
the trammels of a fixed design, very wisely, and for a wonder not
unsuccessfully, gave it a continuation. And, except the equally obvious
and arbitrary one of the recapture of the spirit by the magician, it has
and could have no end. The most famous of the anecdotes about it is that
Boileau--in 1707 a very old man--found his page reading it, and declared
that such a book and such a critic as he should never pass a night under
the same roof. Boileau, though he often said rude, unjust, and
uncritical things, did not often say merely silly ones; and it has been
questioned what was his reason for objecting to a book by no means
shocking to anybody but Mrs. Grundy Grundified to the very _n_th,
excellently written, and quite free from the bombast and the
whimsicality which he loathed. Jealousy for Moliere,[315] to whom, in
virtue of _Turcaret_, Lesage had been set up as a sort of rival; mere
senile ill-temper, and other things have been suggested; but the matter
is of no real importance even if it is true. Boileau was one of the
least catholic and the most arbitrary critics who ever lived; he had
long made up and colophoned the catalogue of his approved library; he
did not see his son's coat on the new-comer, and so he cursed him. It is
not the only occasion on which we may bless what Boileau cursed.

[Sidenote: _Gil Blas_--its peculiar cosmopolitanism.]

_Gil Blas_, of course, is in every sense a "bigger" book of literature.
That it has, from the point of view of the straitest sect of the
Unitarians--and not of that sect only--much more unity than the
_Diable_, would require mere cheap paradox to contend. It has neither
the higher unity, say, of _Hamlet_, where every smallest scene and
almost personage is connected with the general theme; nor the lower
unity of such a thing as _Phedre_, where everything is pared down, or,
as Landor put it in his own case, "boiled off" to a meagre residuum of
theme special. It has, at the very most, that species of unity which
Aristotle did not like even in epic, that of a succession of events
happening to an individual; and