‘Oh!  I know that archbishop—­well,’ interrupted my young tormentor.  ’I sometimes think, if it hadn’t been for that archbishop, we should never perhaps have heard of “Gil Blas."’

‘Tchut, tchut!’ said I; ‘you talk like a child.’

’But to read it all through, papa—­three times, ten times, for all one’s life?  Poor Mr. Bias!’

‘It is a matter of opinion, my dear boy,’ I said.  ’Bias has this great advantage over you in literary matters, that he knows what he is talking about; and if he was quite sure——­’

’Oh! but he was not quite sure:  he was rather doubtful, he said, about one of the books.’

‘Not the Bible, I do hope?’ said I fervently.

’No, about the other.  He was not quite sure but that, instead of “Gil Blas,” he ought to have selected “Don Quixote.”  Now really that seems to me worse than “Gil Blas.”

‘You mean less excellent,’ I rejoined; ’you are too young to appreciate the full signification of “Don Quixote."’

The scoundrel murmured, ’Do you mean to tell me people read it when they are old?’ But I pretended not to hear him.  ‘We do not all of us,’ I went on, ‘know what is good for us.  Sancho Panza’s physician——­’

’Oh!  I know that physician—­well, papa.  I sometimes think, if it had not been for that physician, perhaps——­’

‘Hush!’ I exclaimed authoritatively; ‘let us have no flippancy, I beg.’  And so, with a dead lift as it were, I got rid of him.  He left the room muttering, ’But to read it through—­three times, ten times, for all one’s life?’ And I was obliged to confess to myself that such a prolonged course of study, even of ‘Don Quixote,’ would have been wearisome.

Rabelais is another article of our literary faith, that is certainly subscribed to much more often than believed in.  In a certain poem of Mr. Browning’s (I call it the Burial of the Book, since the Latin name he has given it is unpronounceable, even if it were possible to recollect it), charmingly humorous, and which is also remarkable for impersonating an inanimate object in verse as Dickens does in prose, there occur these lines: 

    ’Then I went indoors, brought out a loaf,
      Half a cheese and a bottle of Chablis,
    Lay on the grass, and forgot the oaf
      Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais.’

Yet I have known some wonder to be expressed (confidentially) as to where he found the ‘jolly chapter,’ and the looking for the beauties of Rabelais to be likened to searching in a huge dung-heap for a few heads of asparagus.

I have no quarrel with Bias and Company (though they stick at nothing, and will presently say that I don’t care for these books myself), but I venture to think that they are wrong in making dogmas of what are, after all, but matters of literary taste; it is their vehemence and exaggeration which drive the weak to take refuge in falsehood.