will be still more lightly, because more correctly estimated, than they are now: when the King, who could make war upon Holland, because he was offended by the device of a burgomaster's seal, and the general who burnt the Palatinate in cold blood, will be looked upon, - with all their refinement and merit of a certain kind, - as belonging essentially to the same class of semi-barbarians with the Tamerlanes and Attilas, the Rolands and the Red Jackets: when the Fouquets and Colberts will be considered as possessing a moral value very little higher than that of the squirrels and snakes, which they not inappropriately assumed as their emblems. But the maxims of La Rochefoucault will never lose their point, nor the poetry of Racine its charm. The graceful eloquence of Fenelon will flow forever through the pages of Telemachus, and the latest posterity will listen with as much, or even greater pleasure than their contemporaries to the discourses of Bossuet and Massillon. The masterly productions of these great men, and their illustrious contemporaries, will perpetuate to the 'last syllable of recorded time' the celebrity which they originally conferred upon the period when they lived, and crown with a light of perennial and unfading glory the age of Louis XIV.

WHO WROTE GIL BLAS? *

[North American Review, Oct. 1827.]

OUR ingenious countryman, Geoffrey Crayon, has somewhere noticed the singular inconsistency in the conduct of certain pedants, who affect to despise the light and popular literary productions of their own time, while they pass their days and nights in studying and illustrating the similar works of the ancient authors. By the same rule, the poems which these critics now reject as immoral or frivolous, will become the favorite objects of investigation with future Hemsterhuises and Ruhnkenii two or three milleniums hence. Such personages, for example, as Sweet Fanny of Timmol, and Tam O'Shanter, however obnoxious at present to the graver part of the community, may then be as interesting to the learned, as the Pyrrhas and Glyceriums of antiquity have always been to the most exemplary modern scholars. There seems, in fact, to be no fixed principles in these matters. St. John, surnamed for his eloquence the Golden Mouth, (Chrysostom,) who habitually thundered from his patriarchal pulpit against every thing licentious in word or action, regularly slept with an Aristophanes under his pillow; and as another instance of the same incongruity, we have

* 1. Observations Critiques sur le Roman de Gil Blas de Santillane; par J. A. LLORENTE, Auteur de l'Histoire Critique de l'Inquisition, &c. 8vo. pp. 310. Paris, 1822.

2. Aventuras de Gil Blas de Santillana, robadas a España y adoptadas en Francia por Monsieur Lesage, restituidas á su Patria y á su Lengua nativa por un Español zeloso que no sufre se burlen de su Nacion. [J. F. DE ISLA.] 4th edition. 4 vols. 12mo. London, 1815.

here two learned Spanish priests vindicating the claims of their country to the authorship of the popular and not very straitlaced novel of Gil Blas, with as much zeal as if the question concerned the Alcalá Polyglott or the Acta Sanctorum. They both indeed enter upon the inquiry with a sort of patriotic enthusiasm, which appears at first view ridiculous enough upon such a subject, but which we are half tempted to excuse, when we recollect the somewhat excessive movements of indignation into which we have been occasionally betrayed ourselves by the remarks of certain meddling foreigners upon the weak points in the character of our own country.

Father Isla, the Spanish translator of Gil Blas, was himself an original writer of merit. His works are mostly of a gay and humorous cast; but on this subject he is as stern as the Roman Cassius, and will bear no raillery. His wrath at the supposed act of larceny committed by Lesage upon the literary property and reputation of one of his countrymen overflows, as the reader will have seen above, even in the title-page, where he declares himself to be a zealous Spaniard, who will not suffer his nation. to be trifled with, and affirms, that he has restored to it a treasure of which it had been robbed by a marauding Frenchman. Llorente, the author of the 'Critical Observations,' is pretty well known to the general reader by several preceding publications, and especially by his history of the Inquisition. He had for forty or fifty years acted as secretary to the branch of this far famed institution which once existed in Spain,* and, after it was abol

It is rather remarkable that Sir John Copley, lately appointed Lord Chancellor of England, (son of our countryman, the celebrated painter,) in a speech on the Catholic question, delivered in Parliament in the month of March, 1827, should have represented the Inquisition as then existing in Spain. Unwearied efforts have been made by the clergy ever since the overthrow of the constitution to obtain the reestablishment of this tribunal, but hitherto without effect. In the winter of 1825-6, the Council of Castile

ished by the Cortes, revealed to the world the secrets of the prisonhouse of which he had so long kept the keys and records. As respects the question now at issue, Llorente, whose passions, at the time when he wrote upon it, had been cooled by the frosts of seventy or eighty winters, discusses it with rather more moderation than Father Isla, but still with evident and very deep feeling. He takes at times a tone bordering on the pathetic, and appeals to the generosity of the French; representing it as a thing below the magnanimity of a great nation, abounding in all sorts of literary riches, to despoil a comparatively poorer neighbor of this pearl of great price. Assuming at the close an air of solemnity, he asserts, that whatever may be the verdict of contemporary critics, the grand tribunal of posterity will certainly decide the question in favor of the claims of Spain.

We are not sufficiently versed in the details of this controversy to be able to say exactly at what period it arose, or to mention all the various alternations of opinion, and successive triumphs of one party or the other, which have probably marked its progress. We believe, however, that the contemporaries of Lesage entertained some doubts as to his full and exclusive right to be considered the original author of Gil Blas. The compilers of a French biographical dictionary, published in 1771, mention the work with the Bachelor of Salamanca, Guzman de Alfarache, and Le Diable Boiteux, among the author's imitations or translations from the Spanish, as if he had himself acknowledged it to be so, as he did the others. It would seem, however, that an opinion expressed in this and the Council of State, the two highest political corporations in the kingdom, both under the influence of the clergy, joined in three successive representations to the king in favor of the measure, with which the king as often refused to comply. These circumstances were commented upon at the time in all the newspapers in Europe, and ought not to have escaped the attention of the attorney general of Great Britain.

way, without explanation or qualification, must have arisen from the carelessness and ignorance of the person who gave it, rather than the probability of the fact, which, if true, was certainly not so notorious or undisputed as this article would make it appear. The assertion proves nevertheless, that there was a current report of this description. Voltaire has somewhere thrown out hints of the same kind; but we are not aware that any formal disquisition had been published on the question until the appearance of the Spanish translation of Father Isla, preceded by a preliminary discourse, in which the worthy Jesuit boldly and peremptorily pronounces Lesage to be a literary pirate.

It must be owned, however, that the learned Father deals in round and angry assertion rather than argument; and upon looking a little narrowly into the substance of his reasoning, we do not find any distinct objection whatever to the claims of the French author, excepting the authority of the above-mentioned biographical dictionary. This is quoted and much relied upon by Isla, but amounts in reality to nothing; because it is perfectly evident that the compiler had paid no attention to the subject, possessed no precise information upon it, and did not mean to treat it as a questionable point. He obviously had in his mind the idea, that the work was an avowed translation or imitation from the Spanish. Father Isla, notwithstanding his confident tone, has no direct proof whatever to support his assertion; nor has he attempted even to make it out by internal evidence, as he naturally should have done, and as Llorente very properly has. The system of Isla is, therefore, wholly baseless as presented by him. In order to show in what manner Lesage became possessed of the Spanish manuscript of Gil Blas, he mentions a report that he had been for several years attached to the French embassy in Spain; and that during