His conversation was always sprinkled with wittily original, finished phrases of general interest.
Of the ordinary teaching of Greek in his day, Fleury wittily observed that most boys " learned just enough of that language to have a pretext for saying for the rest of their lives that Greek was a subject easily forgotten."
But his position in the history of Spanish literature is due to his Historia del famoso predicador fray Gerundio de Campazas, alias Zotes (1758), a novel which wittily caricatures the bombastic eloquence of pulpit orators in Spain.
In our own day, the French have returned to the original application of dialogue, and the inventions of "Gyp," of Henri Lavedan and of others, in which a mundane anecdote is wittily and maliciously told in conversation, would probably present a close analogy to the lost mimes of the early Sicilian poets, if we could meet with them.