



Produced by Lee Dawei, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.









A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NOVEL

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON  BOMBAY  CALCUTTA  MADRAS  MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK  BOSTON  CHICAGO
DALLAS  SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA. LTD.
TORONTO




A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NOVEL

(TO THE CLOSE OF THE 19TH CENTURY)

BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY

M.A. AND HON. D.LITT. OXON.; HON. LL.D. ABERD.; HON. D.LITT. DURH.;
FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY; HON. FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD;
LATE PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
EDINBURGH

VOL. I

FROM THE BEGINNING TO 1800

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1917

COPYRIGHT




PREFACE


In beginning what, if it ever gets finished, must in all probability be
the last of some already perhaps too numerous studies of literary
history, I should like to point out that the plan of it is somewhat
different from that of most, if not all, of its predecessors. I have
usually gone on the principle (which I still think a sound one) that, in
studying the literature of a country, or in dealing with such general
characteristics of parts of literature as prosody, or such coefficients
of all literature as criticism, minorities are, sometimes at least,