nth-century
French novels. He also very kindly allowed me perusal of such of these
as I had not already noticed (from reading at the B. M.) in Vol. I. Of
some, if not all of them, on the principle stated in the Preface of that
vol., I may say something here. There is the _Histoire des Amours de
Lysandre et de Caliste; avec figures_, in an Amsterdam edition of 1679,
but of necessity some sixty years older, since its author, the Sieur
d'Audiguier, was killed in 1624. He says he wrote it in six months,
during three and a half of which he was laid up with eight
sword-wounds--things of which it is itself full, with the appurtenant
combats on sea and land and in private houses, and all sorts of other
divertisements (he uses the word himself of himself) including a very
agreeable ghost-host--a ghost quite free from the tautology and
grandiloquence which ghosts too often affect, though not so poetical as
Fletcher's. "They told me you were dead," says his guest and
interlocutor, consciously or unconsciously quoting the _Anthology_. "So
I am," quoth the ghost sturdily. But he wants, as they so often do, to
be buried. This is done, and he comes back to return thanks, which is
not equally the game, and in fact rather bores his guest, who, to stop
this jack-in-the-box proceeding, begins to ask favours, such as that the
ghost will give him three days' warning of his own death. "I will, _if I
can_," says the Appearance pointedly. The fault of the book, as of most
of the novels of the period, is the almost complete absence of
character. But there is plenty of adventure, in England as well as in
France, and it must be one of the latest stories in which the actual
tourney figures, for Audiguier writes as of things contemporary and
dedicates his book to Marie de Medicis.

_Cleon ou le Parfait Confidant_ (Paris, 1665), and _Hattige ou Les
Amours au Roy de Tamaran_ (Cologne, 1676), the first anonymous, the
second written by a certain G. de Brimond, and dedicated to an
Englishman of whom we are not specially proud--Harry Jermyn, Earl of St.
Albans--are two very little books, of intrinsic importance and interest
not disproportioned to their size. They have, however, a little of both
for the student, in reference to the extension of the novel _kind_. For
_Cleon_ is rather like a "fictionising" of an inferior play of Moliere's
time; and _Hattige_, with its privateering Chevalier de Malte for a hero
and its Turkish heroine who coolly remarks "L'