f him with what, in the
"Bollevian" fashion, was comparative compliment--that is to say, he said
that he did not think Cyrano so bad as somebody else. But long
afterwards, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Gautier took him up
among his _Grotesques_ and embalmed him in the caressing and
immortalising amber of his marvellous style and treatment; while at the
end of the same century one of the chief living poets and playwrights of
France made him the subject of a popular and really pathetic drama. His
_Pedant Joue_ is not a stupid comedy, and had the honour of furnishing
Moliere with some of that "property" which he was, quite rightly, in the
habit of commandeering wherever he found it. _La Mort d'Agrippine_ is by
no means the worst of that curious school of tragedy, so like and so
unlike to that of our own "University wits," which was partly
exemplified and then transcended by Corneille, and which some of us are
abandoned enough to enjoy more as readers, though as critics we may find
more faults with it, than we find it possible to do with Racine. But the
_Voyage a la Lune_, as well as, though rather less than, its
complementary dealing with the Sun, has been praised with none of these
allowances. On the contrary, it has had ascribed to it the credit of
having furnished, not scraps of dialogue or incident, but a solid
suggestion to an even greater than Moliere--to Swift; remarkable
intellectual and scientific anticipations have been discovered in it,
and in comparatively recent times versions of it have been published to
serve as proofs that Cyrano was actually a father[270] of French
eighteenth-century _philosophie_--a different thing, once more, from
philosophy.

Let us, however, use the utmost possible combination of critical
magnanimity with critical justice: and allow these precious additions,
which did not form part of the "classical" or "received" text of the
author, not to count against him. _For_ him they can only count with
those who still think the puerile and now hopelessly stale jests about
Enoch and Elijah and that sort of thing clever. But they can be either
disregarded or at least left out of the judgment, and it will yet remain
true that the so-called _Voyage_ is a very disappointing book indeed. As
this is one of the cases where the record of personal experience is not
impertinent, I may say that I first read it some forty years ago, when
fresh from reading about it and its author in "Theo's" pros