f, or the sort of filigree play with thought
and phrase which Marivaux would have given, would be required. As a
"Crebillonnade" (_v. inf._) it might have been both pleasant and subtle,
but it could only have been made so by becoming exceedingly indecent.

[Sidenote: _Cleveland._]

Still, its comparative (though only comparative) shortness, and a
certain possibility rather than actuality of interest in the
situation,[340] may recommend this novel at least to mercy. If the
present writer were on a jury trying _Cleveland_, no want of food or
fire should induce him to endorse any such recommendation in regard to
that intolerable book. It is, to speak frankly, one of the very few
books--one of the still fewer novels--which I have found it practically
impossible to read even in the "skim and skip and dip" fashion which
should, no doubt, be only practised as a work of necessity (_i.e._ duty
to others) and of mercy (to oneself) on extraordinary occasions, but
which nobody but a prig and a pedant will absolutely disallow. Almost
the only good thing I can find to say about it is that Prevost, who
lived indeed for some time in England, is now and then, if not always,
miraculously correct in his proper names. He can actually spell
Hammersmith! Other merit--and this is not constant (in the dips which I
have actually made, to rise exhausted from each, and skip rather than
even skim to the rest)--I can find none. The beginning is absurd and
rather offensive, the hero being a natural son of Cromwell by a woman
who has previously been the mistress of Charles I. The continuation is a
mish-mash of adventure, sometimes sanguinary, but never exciting, travel
(in fancy parts of the West Indies, etc.), and the philosophical
disputations which Sainte-Beuve found interesting. As for the end, no
two persons seem quite agreed what _is_ the end. Sainte-Beuve speaks of
it as an attempted suicide of the hero--the most justifiable of all his
actions, if he had succeeded. Prevost himself, in the Preface to the
_Doyen de Killerine_, repeats an earlier disavowal (which he says he
had previously made in Holland) of a fifth volume, and says that his own
work ended with the murder of Cleveland by one of the characters. Again,
this is a comprehensible and almost excusable action, and might have
followed, though it could not have preceded, the other. But if it was
the end, the other was not. A certain kind of critic may say that it is
my duty to search and