Historia De Gil Blas De Santillana (Tomo I)

Excerpt from Historia de Gil Blas de Santillana: Por Lesage, Traducida por el Padre Isla; Abbreviated And Edited With Introduction Notes, Map And Vocabulary

There are, perhaps, few works in all literature that have proved so entertaining to readers in general regard less of nationality as Gil Blas; for the pleasure called up by this name is likely to be mingled with that which may have given as at a very early age our keenest literary enjoyment, the Arabian N ights, Grimm's H ousehold Fairy Tales, and Robinson Crusoe; and like these works, it belongs to no nation or period, but is the common property of all ages and all countries. It hardly occurs to any one to'ask when the hero lived or of what na tionality he was; the experiences that he went through absorb all the attention, and in the main because they are typical of the feelings of all men under like circumstances everywhere. Locked at, however, as is natural here from a less general and more literary point of view, it must be plain to any one familiar with the literature that preceded and followed Gil Blas, that this work represents neither one nor the other, but is ii anything representative of an epoch of transition between the two; for, as has rightly been said of it �t seems to have had no striking popular models before �t nor any imitations so universally successful afterwards and indeed its influence made itself felt at first rather more in England than in France.

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