The particular circumstances of Spain had given a strong cast of originality to the character of their literature. The close neighbourhood of so many petty kingdoms, so frequently engaged in intestine wars, occasioned numerous individual adventures, which could not have taken place under any one established government. The high romantic character of chivalry which was cherished by the natives, the vicinity of the Moors, who had imported with them the wild, imaginative, and splendid fictions of Araby the blessed-the fierceness of the Spanish passions of love and vengeance, their thirst of honour, their unsparing cruelty, placed all the materials of romance under the very eye of the author who wished to use them. If his characters were gigantic and overstrained in the conception, the writer had his apology in the temper of the nation where his scene was laid; if his incidents were extravagant and improbable, a country in which Castilians and Arragonese, Spaniards and Moors, Mussulmans and Christians, had been at war for so many ages, could furnish historians with real events, which might countenance the boldest flights of the romance. And here it is impossible to avoid remarking, that the French, the gayest people in Europe, have formed their stage on a plan of declamatory eloquence, which all other nations have denounced as intolerable, while the Spaniard,

VOL. I.

3

grave, solemn, and stately, was the first to introduce on the stage all the bustle of lively and complicated intrigue, the flight and the escape, the mask and ladder of ropes, closets, dark lanterns, trap-doors, and the whole machinery of constant and hurried action; and that with such a profusion of invention, that the Spanish theatre forms a mine in which the dramatic authors of almost all other countries have wrought for ages, and are still working, with very slight chance either of failure or detection.

Le Sage was not slow in endeavouring to turn to his own advantage his acquaintance with the Spanish drama. He translated from the original of Don Francisco de Rojas, Le Traître Puni. It was not acted, but printed in the year 1700. Another play, Don Félix de Mendoce, he translated from Lope de Vega, but this also remained unacted, and was not even printed, until the author published his Théâtre, in 1739.

Le Point d'Honneur, another translation from the Spanish, was performed at the Théâtre Français in 1702, without success. The satire turned upon the pedantic punctilios formerly annexed to the discussion of personal «dependencies,» as they were called, when men quarrelled by the book, and arranged a rencontre according to the rules of logic. This fantastic humour, which, so early as the age o

Shakspeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher, had been successfully ridiculed on the English stage, was probably rather too antiquated to be the subject of satire on that of Paris, in the beginning of the 18th century. The Point of Honour was only twice represented.

In 1707, Don Cæsar Ursin, a comedy translated by Le Sage from the Spanish of Calderon. was acted and condemned at the Théâtre Français. To make the author some amends, the same audience received, with the most marked applause, the lively farce entitled Crispin Rival de son Mattre, which Garrick introduced upon the English stage, under the title of Neck or Nothing. It is uncommon for a dramatic author to be applauded and condemned for two different pieces in the same day; but Le Sage's destiny was even still more whimsical. Don Cæsar, we have said, was hissed in the city, and Crispin applauded. At a representation before the court, the judgment was reversed—the play was applauded, and the farce condemned without mercy. Time has confirmed the judgment of the Parisians, and annulled that of Versailles.

Le Sage made yet another essay on the regular stage, with his comedy of Turcaret, in which he has painted the odious yet ridiculous character of a financier, risen from the lowest order of society by tricks and usury, prodigal of his newly-acquired wealth upon a

false and extravagant mistress of quality, and refusing to contribute even to relieve the extreme necessity of his wife and near relations. As men of business, and a class so wealthy, the financiers have always possessed interest at court, and that interest seems to have been exerted with success to prevent so odious a personification of their body from appearing on the stage. The embargo was removed by an order of Monseigneur, dated October 15, 1708. While the play was yet in his portfolio, Le Sage had an opportunity to show how little his temper was that of a courtier. He had been pressed to read his manuscript comedy at the Hôtel de Bouillon, at the hour of noon, but was detained till two o'clock by the necessity of attending the decision of a lawsuit in which he was deeply interested. When he at length appeared, and endeavoured to plead his excuse, the Duchess of Bouillon received his apology with coldness, haughtily remarking, he had made the company lose two hours in waiting for his arrival.—« It is easy to make up the loss, Madam,» replied Le Sage; «< I will not read my comedy, and you will thus regain the lost time. » He left the hotel, and could never be prevailed on to return thither.

Turcaret was acted, and was successful, in spite of the cabal formed against it by the exertions of those concerned in the finances.

The author, in imitation of Molière, added a sort of dramatic criticism, in which he defended the piece against the censures which had been passed against it. The speakers in this critical interlude were Don Cleofas and the Diable Boîteux. They appeared on the stage as unseen spectators of the representation of Turcaret, and spoke between the acts, like the assistants in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour; the tendency of the dialogue being to exult in the author's success, and ridicule the cabal by which it had been assailed. We learn, in the course of their conversation, that besides all the friends of the author, and all his friends' friends, a guard of the police was necessary to restrain the zeal of the clerks and dependants of the financial department. Asmodeus maintains his character as a satirist, and, pointing out to Don Cleofas a violent debate betwixt the friends and enemies of the piece, observes, that as it becomes warm, the one party spoke worse of the piece than they thought, and the other thought less good of it than they uttered.

Turcaret seems the only original piece which Le Sage composed on the plan of the French regular comedy; and though it had great poignancy of satire, the principal character on which the whole turns is almost too worthless and too wicked to be ridiculous, or truly comic.

Indeed Turcaret is rendered so odious,