episodes merely, and episodes in the loose, not the precise, sense of
the term. That is to say, they are not merely detachable; they might be
reattached to almost any number of other stories. But the redeeming
feature--which is very much more than a _mere_ redeeming feature--is the
personality of the hero which has been already referred to. Lesage's
scrip and staff, to apply the old images exactly enough, are his
inexhaustible fertility in well-told stories and his faculty of
delineating a possible and interesting human character.

[Sidenote: Its inequality--in the Second and Fourth Books especially.]

The characteristics of the successive parts of _Gil Blas_ are distinct
and interesting, the distinctions themselves being also rather curious.
The anecdote cited above as to the Fourth and last volume is certainly
confirmed by, and does not seem, as so many anecdotes of the kind do, to
have been even possibly drawn from, the volume itself. Although the old
power is by no means gone, the marks of its failing are pretty obvious.
A glance has been given already to the unnecessary and disgusting
repetition of the Pandar business--made, as it is, more disgusting by
the distinctly tragic touch infused into it. The actual _finale_ is, on
the other hand, a good comedy ending of a commonplace kind, except that
a comic author, such as Lesage once had been on and off the stage, would
certainly have made _Gil Blas_ suffer in his second marriage for his
misdeeds of various kinds earlier, instead of leaving him in the not too
clean cotton or clover of an old rip with a good young wife. If he had
wanted a happy ending of a still conventional but satisfactory kind, he
should have married Gil to Laure or Estelle (they were, in modern slang,
sufficiently "shop-worn goods" not to be ill-mated, and Laure is perhaps
the most attractive character in the whole book); have legitimated
Lucrece, as by some odd crotchet he definitely refuses to do;[320] have
dropped the later Leporello business, in which his old love and her
daughter are concerned, altogether, and have left us in a mild sunset of
"reconciliation." If anybody scorns this suggestion as evidence of a
futile liking for "rose-pink," let him remember that Gil Blas,
_ci-devant picaro_ and other ugly things, is actually left lapped in an
Elysium not less improbable and much more undeserved than this. But it
is disagreeable to dwell on the shortcomings of age, and it has only
been done to s