scores and hundreds of
actual loves in some cases and at least passing intimacies in
others,[423] does he ever appear to have taken either the Restoration
and Regency tone on the one hand, or that of "sickly sentimentality" on
the other. Against commerce for money he lifts up his testimony
unceasingly; he has, as his one editor has put it, a _manie de
paternite_, and denounces any vice disconnected with it. With the
privileges of Solomon or Haroun al Raschid, Restif would have been
perfectly contented: and he never would have availed himself of that of
Schahriar before the two divine sisters put a stop to it.

All this, however, strictly speaking, is outside our present subject,
and is merely intended as a sort of excuse for the introduction of a
writer who has been unfairly ostracised, not as a passport for Restif to
the young person. But his actual qualities as tale-teller are very
remarkable. The second title of _Monsieur Nicolas_--_Le Coeur Humain
Devoile_--ambitious as it is, is not fatuous. It is a human heart in a
singularly morbid condition which is unveiled: but as, if I remember
rightly, either Goethe or Schiller, or both, saw and said near the time,
there is no charlatanery about the unveiling, and no bungling about the
autopsy. Restif has been compared, and not unfairly, to Defoe, as well
as to Rousseau; in a certain way he may be likened to Pepys; and all
four share an intense and unaffected reality, combined, however, in the
Frenchman's case with a sort of exaggeration of a dreamy kind, and with
other dream-character, which reminds one of Borrow, and even of De
Quincey. His absolute shamelessness is less unconnected with this
dream-quality than may at first appear, and, as in all such cases, is
made much less offensive by it. Could he ever have taken holiday from
his day-long and night-long devotion to

Cotytto or Venus
Astarte or Ashtoreth,

he might have been a most remarkable novelist, and as it is his _mere_
narrative faculty is such as by no means every novelist possesses.
Moreover, he counts, once more, in the advance towards real things in
fiction. "A pretty kind of reality!" cries Mrs. Grundy. But the real is
not always the pretty, and the pretty is not always the real.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Pigault-Lebrun--the difference of his positive and relative
importance.]

There is also a good deal that is curious, as well as many things that
are disgusti