how that this is a criticism and not a mere panegyric.

Oddly enough, the Second volume is also open to much exception of
something, though not quite, the same kind; it seems as if Lesage, after
making strong running, had a habit of nursing himself and even
going to sleep for a while. The more than questionable habit of
_histoire_-insertions revives; that of the rascal-hermit _picaro_, "Don
Raphael," is, as the author admits, rather long, and, as he might have
admitted, and as any one else may be allowed to say, very tiresome. Gil
Blas himself goes through a long period of occultation, and the whole
rather drags.

The First and the Third are the pillars of the house; and the Third,
though (with the exception of the episode of the Archbishop, and that
eternal sentence governing the relations of author and critic that "the
homily which has the misfortune not to be approved" by the one is the
very best ever produced by the other) not so well known, is perhaps even
better than anything in the First. But the later part has, of course,
not quite so much freshness; and nobody need want anything better than
the successive scenes, slightly glanced at already, in which Gil Blas is
taught, by no means finally,[321] the ways of the world; the pure
adventure interest of the robbers' cave, so admirably managed and so
little over-dwelt on; the experiences of travel and of the capital; the
vivid pictures of _petit maitre_ and actress life; the double
deception--thoroughly Spanish this, but most freshly and universally
handled--by Laure and Gil; many other well-known things; all deserve the
knowledge and the admiration that they have won. But the Third, in which
the hero is hardly ever off the scene from first to last, is my own
favourite. He shows himself--not at his best, but humanly enough--in the
affair with the ill-fated Lorenca, on which the Leyva family might have
looked less excusingly if the culprit had been anybody but Gil. The
Granada scenes, however, and not by any means merely those with the
Archbishop, are of the very first class; and the reappearance of Laure,
with the admirable coolness by which she hoodwinks her "keeper"
Marialva, yields to nothing in the book. For fifty pages it is all
novel-gold; and though Gil Blas, in decamping from the place, and
leaving Laure to bear the brunt of a possible discovery, commits one of
his least heroic deeds, it is so characteristic that one forgives, not
indeed him, but his creator