himself to embrace the whole French language in his work." It has been
the parent of a whole school of literature--the Bible of tens of
thousands, with admiring commentators in plenty; on whose souls may God
have mercy!

And no wonder. The book has a solid value, and will always have, not
merely from its perfect art (according to its own measure and intention),
but from its perfect truthfulness. It is the Ancien Regime itself. It
set forth to the men thereof, themselves, without veil or cowardly
reticence of any kind; and inasmuch as every man loves himself, the
Ancien Regime loved "Gil Blas," and said, "The problem of humanity is
solved at last." But, ye long-suffering powers of heaven, what a
solution! It is beside the matter to call the book ungodly, immoral,
base. Le Sage would have answered: "Of course it is; for so is the world
of which it is a picture." No; the most notable thing about the book is
its intense stupidity; its dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance
of the human heart, want of any human interest. If it be an epos, the
actors in it are not men and women, but ferrets--with here and there, of
course, a stray rabbit, on whose brains they may feed. It is the inhuman
mirror of an inhuman age, in which the healthy human heart can find no
more interest than in a pathological museum.

That last, indeed, "Gil Blas" is; a collection of diseased specimens. No
man or woman in the book, lay or clerical, gentle or simple, as far as I
can remember, do their duty in any wise, even if they recollect that they
have any duty to do. Greed, chicane, hypocrisy, uselessness are the
ruling laws of human society. A new book of Ecclesiastes, crying,
"Vanity of vanity, all is vanity;" the "conclusion of the whole matter"
being left out, and the new Ecclesiastes rendered thereby diabolic,
instead of like that old one, divine. For, instead of "Fear God and keep