shorter novelle in the same vein; but, thereafter, he became as thorough-going a champion, in theory and practice, of realism in fiction as any Zola of to-day. "L'histoire, véritable ou feinte, doit représenter au plus près du naturel; autrement c'est une fable qui ne sert qu'à entretenir les enfans au coin du feu, non pas les esprits mûrs." That is the doctrine in the rigid application of which Sorel condemns all romances from the Iliad to Sidney's Arcadia and d'Urfé's Astrée.
This ridicule of romance is the sole purpose of Le Berger Extravagant, which was intended to be the Don Quixote of the pastoral. There is much that is clever and amusing in its fantastic absurdities, but Sorel failed altogether to appreciate the noble art by which Cervantes preserves our respect and affection for the knight in his absurdities and misfortunes. Lysis, the hero of Sorel's romance, the son of a Paris shopkeeper, who has crazed his brains by reading pastorals, has no quality that claims esteem or interest.
In Francion Sorel conducts the picaresque hero, whose life he details from childhood, through an endless series of adventures, which afford an opportunity for the satiric portrayal of different classes—courtiers, pedants, peasants, Paris rogues, lawyers, and men of letters. We owe to Sorel a striking picture of the darker side of literary life in the seventeenth century, such as his great successor Smollett and many others were to give of the same life a century later. "Déguisements" were a feature of the realistic as of the romantic novel, and Malherbe, Balzac, Racan, and other authors are adumbrated in different persons who
