gly dropped,
promptly kneels down, and kisses it: these and many other things fill up
a Spanish kind of story, not uningeniously though rather improbably
engineered, but dependent for its interest almost wholly on incident;
for though it is not devoid of conversation, this conversation is
without spirit or sparkle. It is, in fact, a "circulating library" novel
before--at any rate at an early period of--circulating libraries: not
unworkmanlike, probably not very unsatisfactory to its actual readers,
and something of a document as to the kind of satisfaction they
demanded; but not intrinsically important.

One has not seen much, in English,[324] about Marivaux, despite the
existence, in French, of one of the best[325] of those monographs which
assist the foreign critic so much, and sometimes perhaps help to beget
his own lucubrations. Yet he is one of the most interesting writers of
France, one of the most curious, and, one may almost say, one of the
most puzzling. This latter quality he owes, in part at least, to a
"skiey influence" of the time, which he shares with Lesage and Prevost,
and indeed to some extent with most French writers of the eighteenth
century--the influence of the polygraphic habit.

[Sidenote: His work in general.]

He was a dramatist, and a voluminous one, long before he was a novelist:
and some of his thirty or forty plays, especially _Les Fausses
Confidences_ and _Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard_, still rank among at
least the second-class classics of the French comic stage. He tried, for
a time, one of the worst kinds of merely fashionable literature, the
travesty-burlesque.[326] He was a journalist, following Addison openly
in the title, and to some extent in the manner, of _Le Spectateur_,
which he afterwards followed by _Le Cabinet d'un Philosophe_, showing,
however, here, as he was more specially tempted to do, his curious, and
it would seem unconquerable, habit of leaving things unfinished, which
only does not appear in his plays, for the simple and obvious reason
that managers will not put an unfinished play on the stage, and that, if
they did, the afterpiece would be premature and of a very lively
character. But the completeness of his very plays is incomplete; they
"run huddling" to their conclusion, and are rather bundles of good or
not so good acts and scenes than entire dramas. We are, however, only
concerned with the stories, of which there are three: the early,
complete, but doubtfu