espect of matter
thus postponed, unless it is perceived to be of very exceptional
quality. These larger works of Crebillon's are not good, though they are
not by any means so bad as those of Prevost. There are nuggets, of the
shrewd sense and the neat phrase with which he has been credited, in
nearly all of them: and these the skilled prospector of reading gold
will always detect and profit by. But, barring the possibility of a
collection of such, the _Oeuvres Choisies_ of Crebillon need not
contain more than the best parts of _Le Sopha_, the two comparatively
short dialogue-tales, and a longer passage or two from _Tanzai et
Neadarne_. It would constitute (I was going to say a respectable, but as
that is hardly the right word, I will say rather) a tolerable volume.
Even in a wider representation _Les Heureux Orphelins_ and _Lettres
Atheniennes_ would yield very little.

The first begins sensationally with the discovery, by a young English
squire in his own park, of a foundling girl and boy--_not_ of his own
production--whom he brings up; and it ends with a tedious description of
how somebody founded the first _petite maison_ in England--a worthy work
indeed. It is also noteworthy for a piece of bad manners, which, one
regrets to say, French writers have too often committed; lords and
ladies of the best known names and titles in or near Crebillon's own
day--such as Oxford, Suffolk, Pembroke--being introduced with the utmost
nonchalance.[349] Our novelists have many faults to charge themselves
with, and Anthony Trollope, in _The Three Clerks_, produced a Frenchman
with perhaps as impossible a name as any English travesty in French
literature. But I do not remember any one introducing, in a _not_
historical novel, a Duc de la Tremoille or a member of any of the
branches of Rohan, at a time when actual bearers of these titles existed
in France. As for the _Lettres Atheniennes_, if it were not for
completeness, I should scarcely even mention them. Alcibiades is the
chief male writer; Aspasia the chief female; but all of them, male and
female, are equally destitute of Atticism and of interest. The contrast
of the contrasts between Crebillon's and Prevost's best and worst work
is one of the oddest things in letters. One wonders how Prevost came to
write anything so admirable as _Manon Lescaut_; one wonders how
Crebillon came to write anything so insufficient as the two books just
criticised, and even others.

It may be said,