. _Gil Blas_, his greatest work, originally appeared in
1715, but was not completed till twenty years later. He also
wrote--besides one or two bright but trifling minor works of a
fictitious character, _La Valise Trouvee_ (a letter-bag supposed to be
picked up), _Une Journee des Parques_, a keen piece of Lucianic satire,
etc.--many other romances in the same general style as his great works,
and more or less borrowed from Spanish originals. The chief of these are
_Guzman d'Alfarache_, _Estevanille Gonzalez_, _Le Bachelier de
Salamanque_, and a curious Defoe-like book entitled _Vie et Aventures de
M. de Beauchene_. In his old age he retired to the house of his second
son, who held a canonry at Boulogne, and resided there for some years,
until, in 1747, he died in his eightieth year. His works have hitherto
been very insufficiently collected and edited.

_Le Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_ are far the greatest of Lesage's
romances, and, as it happens, they are the most original, little except
the starting-point being borrowed in the one case, and nothing but a few
detached details in the other. Lesage was, however, true to the general
spirit of his model, the picaroon romance of Spain, a kind of Roman
d'Aventures transported from the days and conventional conditions of
chivalry to those of ordinary but still adventurous life in the
Peninsula. The directly satirical intention predominates in the _Diable
Boiteux_, the more purely narrative faculty in _Gil Blas_. In both the
piercing observation of human character, which Lesage possessed in a
greater degree perhaps than any other French writer, appears, and so
does his remarkable power of making the results of this observation live
and move. No French writer is so little of a mere Frenchman as Lesage,
and in this point of cosmopolitan humanity he may be compared, without
extravagance, in kind if not in degree, to Shakespeare. Besides his
skill in character-drawing, and his faculty of spicing his narrative
with epigram, Lesage also possessed extraordinary narrative ability. His
books are not remarkable for what is called plot, that is to say, the
action rather continues indefinitely in a straight line than converges
on a given and definite point. But this continuance is so adroitly
managed that no break is felt, and the succession very seldom becomes
tedious. The novel of Lesage is the immediate parent and pattern of that
of Fielding and Smollett in England. It is somewhat rema