residing under the roof of his son the canon, that we obtain an interesting account of Le Sage, then extremely aged, from the pen of the Comte de Tressan, to whom the ancient romances of France owe the same favour which has been rendered to those of England by the late ingenious and excellent George Ellis. The reader will feel interested in receiving the communication in the words of the Count himself. "Paris, 20th January, 1783. "You have requested from me some account of the concluding period of the celebrated author of Gil Blas. Here follow the few anecdotes which I am able to furnish. “In the end of the year 1745, after the battle of Fontenoy, the late King having named me to serve under the Maréchal de Richelieu, I received counter orders at Boulogne, and remained there, commandant of the Boulenois, Poitou, and Picardy. 66 Having learned that Mons. Le Sage, aged upwards of eighty years, with his wife nearly as old, resided at Boulogne, I was early desirous of visiting them, and of acquainting myself with their situation. I found that they lived in family with their son, a canon of the Cathedral of Boulogne ; and never was filial piety more tenderly occupied than his, in cheering and supporting the latter days of parents, who had scarce any other resource than the moderate revenue of their son. "The Abbé Le Sage enjoyed the highest respect at Boulogne. His talents, his virtues, his social affections, rendered him dear to Monseigneur de Pressy, his worthy bishop, to his fraternity, and to the public. "I have seen few resemblances more striking than that of the Abbé Le Sage to his brother Mons. de Montmenil; he had even a portion of his talents, and of his most agreeable qualities. No one could read verses more agreeably. He possessed the uncommon art of that variation of tone, and of employing those brief pauses, which, without being actual declamation, impress on the hearers the sentiments and the beauties of the author. “I had known, and I regretted, Mons. Montmenil. I entertained esteem and friendship for his brother; and the late Queen, in consequence of the account which I had to lay before her of the Abbé Le Sage's situation, and his narrow fortune, pro cured him a pension upon a benefice. "I had been apprized not to go to visit Mons. Le Sage till near the approach of noon; and the feelings of that old man made me observe, for a second time, the effect which the state of the atmosphere produces in the melancholy days of bodily decline. "Mons. Le Sage awaking every morning so soon as the sun appeared some degrees above the horizon, became animated, acquired feeling and force, in proportion as that planet approached the meridian; but as the sun began to decline, the sensibility of the old man, the light of his intellect, and the activity of his bodily organs, began to diminish in proportion; and no sooner had the sun descended some degrees under the horizon, than he sunk into a lethargy, from which it was difficult to rouse him "I took care only to make my visit at that period of the day when his intellect was most clear, which was the hour after he had dined. I could not view without emotion the respectable old man, who preserved the gaiety and urbanity of his better years, and sometimes even displayed the imagination of the author of the Diable Boiteux and of Turcaret. But one day, having come more late than usual, I was sorry to see that his conversation began to resemble the last homilies of the Bishop of Grenada, and I instantly withdrew. "Mons. Le Sage had become very deaf. I always found him seated near a table on which lay a large hearing-trumpet; that trumpet, which he sometimes snatched up with vivacity, remained unmoved on the table, when the nature of the visit which he received did not encourage him to hope for agreeable conversation. As I commanded in the province, I had the pleasure to see him always make use of it in conversation with me; and it was a lesson which prepared me to sustain the petulant activity of the hearing-trumpet of my dear and illustrious associate and friend Mons. de la Condamine.1 "Monsieur Le Sage died in winter 1746-7. I considered it as an honour and duty to attend his funeral, with the principal officers under my command. His widow survived him but a short time; and a few years afterwards, the loss of the Abbé 1 Mons. de la Condamine, very deaf and very importunate, was the terror of the members of the Academie, from the vivacity with which he urged enquiries, which could only be satisfied by the inconvenient medium of his hearing-trumpet. Le Sage became the subject of regret to his Chapter, and the enlightened society to which he was endeared by his virtues." The interesting account of Monsieur de Tressan having conducted Le Sage to an honoured tomb, we have but to add, that an epitaph, placed over his grave, expressed, in indifferent poetry, the honourable truth, that he was the friend of Virtue rather than of Fortune.1 Indeed when the giddy hours of youth were passed, his conduct seems to have been irreproachable; and if, in his works, he has assailed vice rather with ridicule than with reproach, and has, at the same time, conducted his story through scenes of pleasure and of license, his Muse has moved with an unpolluted step, even where the path was somewhat miry. In short, it is highly to the honour of Le Sage, that differing in that particular from many of his countrymen who have moved in the same walk of letters,-he has never condescended to pander to vice by warmth or indelicacy of description. If Voltaire, as it is said, held the powers of Le Sage in low estimation, such slight regard was particularly misplaced towards one, who, without awakening one evil thought, was able, by his agreeable fictions, to excite more lasting and more honourable interest than the witty Lord of Ferney himself, even though Asmodeus sat at his elbow to aid him in composing Candide and Zadig. 1 "Sous ce tombeau Le Sage abattu, CHARLES JOHNSTONE. Or the author of the Adventures of a Guinea, a satire which, from its resemblance to the Diable Boiteux, arranges naturally with those of the author of Gil Blas, we can say but little. CHARLES JOHNSTONE was an Irishman by birth, though it is said a Scotsman by descent, and of the Annandale family. If so, we have adopted the proper orthography, though his name seems to have sometimes been spelt Johnson. He received a classical education; and, being called to the Bar, came to England to practise. Johnstone, like Le Sage and the coincidence is a singular one-was subject to the infirmity of deafness, an inconvenience which naturally interfered with his professional success ;—although, by a rare union of high talents with eloquence and profound professional skill, joined to an almost intuitive acuteness of apprehension, we have, in our time, seen the disadvantage splendidly surmounted. But Johnstone possessed considerable abilities, of which he has left at least one admirable example, in the Adventures of a Guinea. His talents were of a lively and companionable sort, and as he was much abroad in the world, he had already, in his youth, kept such general society with men of all descriptions, as |