One does not quite know why Scott, who included in the Ballantyne Novels three of Bage's, _Mount Henneth_ (1781), _Barham Downs_ (1784), and _James Wallace_ (1788), did not also include, if not _The Fair Syrian_ (1787), two others, _Man as He is_ (1792) and the still later _Hermsprong_, or _Man as He is Not_ (1796).

This last has sometimes been regarded as Bage's masterpiece: but it does not seem so to the present writer.

It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate child, written in Bage's worst vein of hard rasping irony, entirely devoid of the delicate spring and "give" which irony requires, and which constitutes the triumph even of such things as _A Tale of a Tub_ and _Jonathan Wild_.

The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is not really so named at all, but is related (and in fact head-of-the-house) to the wicked or at least not good lord of the story.

He is of the kind of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all these novels and is a great bore--as, indeed, to me is the whole book.