472 L E E L E 8 sentiment, and knowledge." His religious doctrine is Pantheistic; and, rejecting the belief in a future life as commonly conceived, lie substitutes for it a theory of metempsychosis. In social economy his views are very vague ; he preserves the family, country, and property, but finds in all three, as they now are, a despotism which must be eliminated. He imagines certain combinations by which this triple tyranny can be abolished, so that the human being may be developed under the influence of those several institutions with out being oppressed by them. But his solution seems to require the creation of families without heads, countries without governments, and property without rights of possession. In politics he advocates absolute equality a democracy pushed to anarchy. A full criticism of his system will be found in L. Keybaud s Etudes sur Ics Eeforma- teurs et Socialises Moderncs. The full title of Leroux s principal work is DC VHumanite, de son priucipe et de son avcnir, oil se trouve exposec la vraie definition de la religion, et oil Von cxpliqiic Ic sens, la suite, ct Venchaincmcnt du Mosaisme ct du Christ ianisme. A second edition of this work appeared in 1845. Amongst his other publications, in addition to some already mentioned, areDiscours sur la situation actuclle de la Societe ct de Vcsprit humain, 1841, new ed., 2 vols., 1847 ; D unc Religion nationale, ou du Culte, 1846 ; Discours sur la fixation dcs lieures de travail, 1848 ; Projet d une Constitution democratique ct sacialc, 1848 ; Du Christianismc ct de scs origines democrat iques, 1848 ; Le Carrossc de M. Aguado, ou si cc sont les riches qui paycnt lespauvres, 1848 ; De la Ploutocratic ; ou du gouverncment dcs riches, 1848 ; Malthus ct l;s ficonomistcs, ou Y aura-t-il toujours dcs pauvres? 1848; Quclqucs pages de Verites, 1859; portions of a philosophical poem, entitled La Greve de Samarcz, 1863-64 ; Job, dramc en cinq actes, par Ic prophetc Isa ie, traduit dc V hebrcu, 1865. M. Leroux also produced, with the aid of an anonymous collaborator, a translation of Goethe s Werihcr, which was published in 1843, with a preface by George Sand. LERWICK. See SHETLAND ISLANDS. LE SAGE, ALAIN RENE (1668-1747), novelist and dramatist, was born at Sarzeau in the psninsula of Rliuys, between the Morbihan and the sea, ou the 8th of May 1G63, and died on the 17th of November 1747, at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Rhuys was a legal district, and Claude Le Sage, the father of the novelist, held the united positions of advocate, notary, and registrar of its royal court. His wife s name was Jeanne Brenugat. Both father and mother died when Le Sage was very young, and his property was wasted or embezzled by his guardians. Little is known of his youth except that he went to school with the Jesuits at Yannes until he was eighteen. Conjecture has it that he continued his studies at Paris, and it is certain that he was called to the bar at the capital in 1692. In August 1694 he married tha daughter of a joiner, Marie Elizabeth Huyarcl. She was beautiful but had no fortune, and Le Sage had little practice. About this time he met his old schoolfellow the dramatist Danchet, and is said to have been advised by him to betake himself to literature. He bsgan modestly as a translator, and published in 1695 a French version of the Epistles of Aristaenetus, which was not successful. Shortly afterwards lie found a valuable patron and adviser in the Abbe de Lyonne, who bestowed on him an annuity of 600 livres, and recommended him to exchange the classics for Spanish literature, of which he was himself a student and collector. Le Sage began by translating plays chiefly from Rojas and Lope de Vega. Le Tra:tre Puni and Le Point d Honneur from the former, Don Felix de Mendoce from the latter, were acted or published in the first two or three years of the 18th century. In 1704 hi translated the continuation of Don Quixote by Avellaneda, and soon afterwards adapted a play from Calderon, Don Cesar Ursiit., which had a divided fate, being successful at court and damned in the city. He was, however, nearly forty before lie obtained anything like decided success. But in 1707 his admirable farce of Crispin Rival de son Mctitre was acted with great applause, and Le DiaUe Boiteux was published. This latter went through several editions in the same year, and was frequently reprinted till 1725, when Le Sage altered and improved it considerably, giving it its present form. Notwithstanding the success of Crispin, the actors did not like Le Sage, and refused a small piece of his called Les Etrennes. He thereupon altered it into Tiircaret, his theatrical masterpiece, and one of the best comedies in French literature. This appeared in 1709. Some years passed before he again attempted romance writing, and then the first two parts of Gil Bias appeared in 1715. Strange to say, it was not so popular as the Dialle Boiteux. Le Sage worked at it for a long time, and did not bring out the third part till 1724, nor the fourth till 1735. For this last he had been part paid to the extent of a hundred pistoles some years before its appearance. This is the only positive statement we have about his gains. During these twenty years he was, however, continually busy. Not withstanding the great merit and success of Turcaret and Crispin, the Theatre Frangais did not welcome him, and in the year of the publication of Gil Bias he began to write for the Theatre tie la Foire the comic opera held in booths at festival time. This, though not a very dignified occupation, was followed by many writers of distinction at this time, and by none more assiduously than by Le Sage. According to one computation he produced either alone or with others about a hundred pieces, varying from strings of songs with no regular dialogues, to comediettas only distinguished from regular plays by the introduction of music. He w r as also industrious in prose fiction. Besides finishing Gil Bias he translated the Orlando Inamorato, rearranged Guzman d Alfarache, published two more or less original novels, Le Bachelier de Salamangue and Estevanille Gonzales, and in 1733 produced the Vie et Aventures de M. de Beauchene, which is curiously like certain works of Defoe. Besides all this, Le Sage was also the author of La Valise Trouvee, a collection of imaginary letters, and of some minor pieces, of which Une Journee des Parqucs is the most remarkable. This laborious life he continued until 1740, when he was more than seventy years of age. His eldest son had become an actor, and Le Sage had disowned him, but the second was a canon at Boulogne in comfortable circumstances. In the year just mentioned his father and mother went to live with him. At Boulogne Le Sage spent the last seven years of his life, dying, as has been said, on the 17th of November 1747, at the age of nearly eighty. Not much is known of Le Sage s life and personality, and the foregoing paragraph contains not only the most important but almost the only facts available for it. The few anecdotes which we have of him represent him as a man of very independent temper, declining to accept the condescending patronage which in the earlier part of the century was still the portion of men of letters. Thus it is said that, on being remonstrated with, as he thought impolitely, for an unavoidable delay in appearing at the duchess of Bouillon s house to read Turcaret, he at once put the play in his pocket and retired, refusing absolutely to return. In his old age, when he was very deaf, lie is also said to have been decidedly arbitrary in his choice of the persons whom he permitted to have access to his trumpet, but this is not unusual in such cases. It may, however, be said that as in time so in position he occupies a place apart from most of the great writers of the 1 7th and 18th centuries respectively. He was not the object of royal patronage like the first, nor the pet of salons and coteries like the second. Indeed he seems all his life to have been purely domestic in his habits, and purely literary in his interests. The importance of Le Sage in French and in European literature is not entirely the same, and he has the rare dis tinction of being more important in the latter than in the former. His literary work may be divided into three parts. The first contains his Theatre de la Foire and his few miscellaneous writings, the second his two remarkable
