his commandments, for that is the whole duty of main," Le Sage sends
forth the new conclusion, "Take care of thyself, and feed on thy
neighbours, for that is the whole duty of man." And very faithfully was
his advice (easy enough to obey at all times) obeyed for nearly a century
after "Gil Blas" appeared.

About the same time there appeared, by a remarkable coincidence, another
work, like it the child of the Ancien Regime, and yet as opposite to it
as light to darkness. If Le Sage drew men as they were, Fenelon tried at
least to draw them as they might have been and still might be, were they
governed by sages and by saints, according to the laws of God.
"Telemaque" is an ideal--imperfect, doubtless, as all ideals must be in a
world in which God's ways and thoughts are for ever higher than man's;
but an ideal nevertheless. If its construction is less complete than
that of "Gil Blas," it is because its aim is infinitely higher; because
the form has to be subordinated, here and there, to the matter. If its
political economy be imperfect, often chimerical, it is because the mind
of one man must needs have been too weak to bring into shape and order
the chaos, social and economic, which he saw around him. M. de
Lamartine, in his brilliant little life of Fenelon, does not hesitate to
trace to the influence of "Telemaque," the Utopias which produced the
revolutions of 1793 and 1848. "The saintly poet was," he says, "without
knowing it, the first Radical and the first communist of his century."
But it is something to have preached to princes doctrines till then
unknown, or at least forgotten for many a generation--free trade, peace,
international arbitration, and the "carriere ouverte aux talents" for all
ranks. It is something to have warned his generation of the dangerous
overgrowth of the metropolis; to have prophesied, as an old Hebrew might
have done, that the despotism which he saw around him would end in a
violent revolution. It is something to have combined the highest