hese things are merged in and spoilt by a torrent
of silliness, sciolism, and sheer nonsense is, even after one has known
the book for forty years and more, still astounding.

One could laugh almost indulgently over the "bug-pipe" and the "First of
the Fourth"; one could, being of those who win, laugh quite indulgently
over the little outbursts of spite in _Les Travailleurs_ at the
institutions and ways of the country which had, despite some rather
unpardonable liberties, given its regular and royal asylum to the
exiled republican and almost anarchist author. Certainly, also, one can
laugh over _L'Homme Qui Rit_ and its picture of the English aristocracy.
But of such laughter, as of all carnal pleasures (to steal from
Kingsley), cometh satiety, and the satiety is rather early reached in
this same book. One of the chief "persons of distinction" in many ways
whom I have ever come across, the late Mr. G. S. Venables--a lawyer of
no mean expertness; one of the earliest and one of the greatest of those
"gentlemen of the Press" who at the middle of the nineteenth century
lifted journalism out of the gutter; a familiar of every kind of the
best society, and a person of infinite though somewhat saturnine
wit--had a phrase of contempt for absurd utterances by persons who ought
to have known better. "It was," he said, "like a drunk child." The major
part of _L'Homme Qui Rit_ is like the utterance of a drunk child who had
something of the pseudo-Homeric Margites in him, who "knew a great many
things and knew them all badly." I could fill fifty pages here easily
enough, and with a kind of low amusement to myself and perhaps others,
by enumerating the absurdities of _L'Homme Qui Rit_. As far as I
remember, when the book appeared, divers good people (the bad people
merely sneered) took immense pains to discover how and why this great
man of letters made so much greater a fool of himself. This was quite
lost labour; and without attempting the explanation at all, a very small
selection of the facts, being in a manner indispensable, may be given.

The mysterious society of "Comprachicos" (Spanish for "child-buyers"),
on whose malpractices the whole book is founded; the entirely false
conception of the English House of Lords, which gives much of the
superstructure; the confusion of English and French times and seasons,
manners and customs, which enables the writer to muddle up Henri-Trois
and Louis-Quinze, Good Queen Bess and Good Queen