th again for placing it here. But he does
so from no mere childish desire to persist in some rebuked naughtiness,
but from a sincere belief in the possession by the book of some
historical importance. Any one who, on Arnoldian principles, declines to
take the historic estimate into account at all, is, on those principles,
justified in neglecting it altogether; whether, on the other hand, such
neglect does not justify a suspicion of the soundness of the principles
themselves, is another question. Charles Sorel, historiographer of
France, was a very voluminous and usually a very dull writer. His
voluminousness, though beside the enormous compositions of the last
chapter it is but a small thing, is not absent from _Francion_, nor is
his dulness. Probably few people have read the book through, and I am
not going to recommend anybody to do so. But the author does to some
extent deserve the cruel praise of being "dull in a new way" (or at
least of being evidently in quest of a new way to be dull in), as
Johnson wrongfully said of Gray. His book is not a direct imitation of
any one thing, though an attempt to adapt the Spanish picaresque style
to French realities and fantasies is obvious enough, as it is likewise
in Scarron and others. But this is mixed with all sorts of other
adumbrations, if not wholly original, yet showing that quest of
originality which has been commended. It is an almost impossible book to
analyse, either in short or long measure. The hero wanders about France,
and has all sorts of adventures, the recounting of which is not without
touches of Rabelais, of the _Moyen de Parvenir_, perhaps of the rising
fancies about the occult, which generated Rosicrucianism and "astral
spirits" and the rest of it--a whole farrago, in short, of matters
decent and indecent, congruous seldom and incongruous often. It is not
like Sterne, because it is dull, and at the same time quasi-romantic;
while "sensibility" had not come in, though we shall see it do so within
the limits of this chapter. It has a resemblance, though not very much
of one, to the rather later work of Cyrano. But it is most like two
English novels of far higher merit which were not to appear for a
century or a century and a half--Amory's _John Buncle_ and Graves's
_Spiritual Quixote_. As it is well to mention things together without
the danger of misleading those who run as they read, and mind the
running rather than the reading, let me observe that the livel