er known--who utilises and improves
and develops rather than invents. It is from this that his faculty of
never boring, except when he has got upon the Scriptures, comes; it is
because of this also that he never conceives anything really, simply,
absolutely _great_. His land is never exactly weary, but there is no
imposing and sheltering and refreshing rock in it. These _romans_ and
_contes_ and _nouvelles_ of his stimulate, but they do not either rest
or refresh. They have what is, to some persons at any rate, the
theatrical quality, not the poetical or best-prosaic. But as nearly
consummate works of art, or at least craft, they stand almost alone.

He had seen[353] the effect of which the fairy tale of the
sophisticated kind was capable, and the attraction which it had for both
vulgars, the great and the small: and he made the most of it. He kept
and heightened its _haut gout_; he discarded the limitations to a very
partial and conventional society which Crebillon put on it; but he
limited it in other ways to commonplace and rather vulgar fancy, without
the touches of imagination which Hamilton had imparted. Yet he infused
an even more accurate appreciation of certain phases of human nature
than those predecessors or partial contemporaries of his who were
discussed in the last chapter had introduced; he _practicalised_ it to
the _n_th, and he made it almost invariably subordinate to a direct,
though a sometimes more or less ignoble, purpose. There is no doubt that
he had learnt a great deal from Lucian and from Lucian's French
imitators, perhaps as far back as Bonaventure des Periers; there is, I
think, little that he had added as much as he could add from Swift.[354]
His stolen or borrowed possessions from these sources, and especially
this last, remind one in essence rather of the pilferings of a "light
horseman," or river-pirate who has hung round an "old three-decker,"
like that celebrated in Mr. Kipling's admirable poem, and has caught
something even of the light from "her tall poop-lanterns shining so far
above him," besides picking up overboard trifles, and cutting loose
boats and cables. But when he gets to shore and to his own workshop, his
almost unequalled power of sheer wit, and his general craftsmanship,
bring out of these lootings something admirable in its own way.

[Sidenote: _Candide._]

_Candide_ is almost "great," and though the breed of Dr. Pangloss in its
original kind is nearly extinct, the Eng