which you may read this inscription: 'Marchand en bétail mort et vivant, vieux cordage,

fer, os et chiques, est prompt dans son paie

ment et dans son attention.'

"Il faudrait être de mauvaise foi pour contester la présence de ces pierres et l'existence de cette maison. Tout cela nuisait à Gilliatt." Occasionally the French would lose its point of droll simplicity by any attempt at translation. Moreover, this Gilliatt had actually been guilty of such acts of malice as taking a brood of young birds from a boy and restoring them to the nest that had been robbed, to the relief of the agonised mother. But he had a weakness for birds; it is a sign by which one generally recognises the magicians!" Gilliatt had the seeming good fortune to have a grand opportunity of winning the favor of Mess Thierry, the great man of the place; to whom he was recommended besides by his athletic frame and dauntless seamanship. And it appeared for a moment as if he had pleased the fancy of the fair Déruchette, the niece and adopted daughter of Thierry. Thence the labor of Hercules he undertook, when he went out to save the engine from the wreck of the Durande, with the hand of Déruchette for the recompense of success.

It is to be remarked that in most of Hugo's romances love plays a secondary part-in 'Quatre-vingt-treize there is not a trace of it-and that in every instance, so far as we remember, the male lover is made the superior being. To his women he freely assigns all the graces of person and manner: they are winning and beautiful, and often kind-hearted; possibly, even, like Fantine and her daughter, they are capable of ardent affection. But more frequently they are volatile and shallow; they have rarely the quick perceptive sympathies that respond to nobility of nature and intellect. Dramatically, we should say that Déruchette should have recognised the man in Gilliatt through the rough husk he could have easily rid himself of; that in place of being shocked and repelled by his squalid aspect, when he comes back from his fierce battle with the elements, which he had been waging for weary weeks for her sake, she should have only seen the hero, and been softened by the proofs of his passion. But in spite of her beauty and engaging ways, she is but a very commonplace female after

all, and Victor Hugo deliberately inin that light, there was nothing unnatended to make her so. Looking at her tural in her being fascinated by the position and the soft raiment of the singularly uninteresting clergyman she prefers. This story, too, like all the others, was predestined to the saddest of ends. It was necessary to show that Gilliatt's mind and will were cast in a mould as heroic as his body. We are meant to measure the absorbing power of his passion by his almost superhuman exertions over the wreck, and the patience with which he endured fatigue and the ravages of disease in all the extremities of thirst and hunger. Through days and nights of solitary and dreary exposure, he had been borne up by a single hope, and cheered by a delightful dream. He came back to disiliusion and disappointment, and we can realise something of the depths of despair to which he fell in the revulsion of his feelings. Déruchette, in her selfishness, has scarcely a thought for him; yet his strength of self-abnegation never fails him for an instant, when there is anything to be done to help her to happiness. It is he who almost forces her into the arms of the man she has preferred. It is he who promises to smooth any difficulties, and who has the courage to attend to the most trivial and commonplace details of her elopement. Finally, when he has seen her fairly on her way, reposing on the shoulder of the man who has robbed him of her, he resigns himself in passive abstraction to the mounting tide, and dies in the sea that has been his cradle and his home.

But as to that crowning act of Gilliatt's, we must differ from Victor Hugo. He intends the placid suicide to be the appropriate climax to a brave career. We have been taught to think self-murder cowardly-a shirking of duty, and a shrinking from pain. With Victor Hugo it is the bravest and the wisest characters who undertake to decide for themselves when they shall shuffle off this mortal coil. That poor Quasimodo, who never had much to live for, should have sought for his rest in the vaults of Montfaucon is nothing surprising. But the stern Javert, in the Misérables,' condemns himself to death for dereliction of duty. Gwynplaine, in 'L'Homme

qui rit,' removes himself out of the world when he suspects that, like Mrs. Gummidge, he "had better be a riddance;" and Cimourdain, in 'Quatre-vingttreize,' the type of inflexible principles, levels his pistol at his own head while the firing-party is disposing of his pupil. In that respect, Hugo has the morals and the notions of a pagan. He does not believe life to be a trust, which we are bound to make the best of until we are relieved from it; but a chance property with which we may play fast and loose, according as the luck runs with us or against us.

It is in his 'Travailleurs de la Mer' that his descriptions of nature are most attractive. Generally speaking, although it may sound hypercritical to say so, he throws too much of his poetry into them. There is a lack of simplicity, and consequently of fidelity, in the expressions of his rapturous admiration. You feel yourself less in the presence of fields and foliage, of rock and plain, than before some elaborate drop-scene in a theatre, painted by an inspired master of the brush. But in the natural aquaria off the Channel Islands, and in the submerged transparencies of the surging waves, with the reflections of trembling lights, Victor Hugo is at home as no other man could be. His effects are heightened by the luxury of metaphors, which he uses so well, and too often abuses. Take the cave into which Gilliatt plunged; the den of the terrible pieuvre, which was to succumb later to his prowess.

"It is by this submerged portal that the brilliancy of the open sea entered the cavern : marvellous light given by absorption.

"This brilliancy diffused itself under the cavern like a broad fan, and reflected itself on

the rocks. Its rectilinear rays, cut out in long, straight strips upon the opacity of the bottom, growing lighter and darker from one broken angle to another, resembled the interposition of sheets of glass. There was light in the cave, but a mysterious light. You might fancy you had made a stride into another planet. The light was an enigma; you might have said it was the purple glare from the pupil of a sphinx. The cave represented the interior of an enormous and splendid death'shead; the vault was the brain, and the arch the mouth, but the eyeballs were wanting. This mouth, swallowing and giving up again the flow and the ebb, yawning in the face of the exterior sunshine, drank in the light and belched out bitterness. There are beings, intelligent and malignant, who resemble that.

The rays of the sunshine, in passing through this porch, obstructed by the glassy density of the debaran. The water, all filled with this moistsea-water, became green as a beam from Alened light, had the appearance of molten emerald. A shade of aqua-marine of inconceivable delicacy, tinged the whole of the cavern. sinuous ramifications like the blossoming of The vault, with lobes almost cerebral, and its

the nerves, showed a soft reflection of the chrysoprase. The watering (moires) of the flood, washing against the ceiling, was in endless course of decomposition and recomposimeshes in the movements of a mysterious tion, enlarging and contracting the golden dance. A spectral impression disengaged itself the mind might ask what was the prey or the joyous purpose of waiting of this magnificent network of living fire. From the rcliefs of the vault, and the asperities of the rock, streamed long and delicate growths of vegetation, probably knitting their roots beyond the granite, in some lap of the upper water, and letting fall, one by one, from their extremities a drop of water-a pearl. These pearls dropped into the abyss with a soft, sweet sound. The effect of the whole was inex

pressible. One could fancy nothing more charming, or happen upon anything more

sombre.

"C'était on ne sait quel palais de la mort, contente."

If any one is disappointed with the translation, we entreat him to refer to the original. We find Victor Hugo one of the most untranslatable of authors. To do bare justice to his imagination, you must stick by a literal rendering; and when you have rendered him literally into bald English, you can only feel remorseful over the injustice you have done him.

With 'L'Homme qui rit' we can conscientiously be brief. To our mind, it falls far below all his later romances; and had he not recovered himself so brilliantly in the one that followed it, we should have said it marked a melancholy decline in his powers. scene is laid in England-in the England of Queen Anne's time, and he seems always to lose his head and strength when he takes his readers with him to English soil.

The

The far-fetched idea is equally repulsive and fantastic. The face of the laughing hero has been cut into its perpetual grin by one of those wandering gangs of Comprachicos, who, as we are informed, made a practice of mangling infants, that the hideous eccentricity might have its price with the depraved fancies of the wealthy. The

work is a burst of bitter satire and fierce

invective against the English aristocracy. And if you took the story au pied du lettre, and admitted all the assertions and assumptions of the author, no doubt you would be sufficiently impressed. Possibly his countrymen may think it a powerful novel; but to an Englishman it is ludicrous. You know that the eloquently imaginative author invents the texts he has determined to preach upon. You see that his fancy has freely colored most of the facts he has not invented. You see that the personages he elaborates in such circumstantial detail, are sheer impossibilities. The very names he christens them by wantonly shock your sense of the conceivable. Even in the free-and-easy régime of Charles II., profligacy was forced to pay some tribute to decency; and "the Duchess Josiane," though the illegitimate sister of the Queen, would very speedily have been banished to Coventry. Lord David Dirry-Moir is rather more extravagant as a man than the Duchess Josiane as a woman. The ressemblance of the story as a reproduction of English life is summed up in the sobriquet his lordship rejoiced in-Tom-Jim-Jack.

One is inclined to smile or laugh, from the first page to the last; and among the choicest caricatures in it, nothing can well be more droll than the account of the boxing-match. For Victor Hugo is by no means free from the foible of his less gifted and less informed countrymen; and when he has a glimmer of an idea on an unfamiliar subject, he discusses that subject with a solemn self-satisfaction which leaves nothing to desire. At the same time, as we need hardly add, this tissue of absurdities is in a measure redeemed by scenes of extraordinary power and passages of singular beauty, the storm, for example, in which the Comprachicos go to the bottom; and the parting of the charming blind girl Dea from her mutilated lover, the grinning man. No being could more naturally provoke to ridicule than Gwynplaine; yet the artificial absurdity of his appearance, so irresistible to all but the blind girl, heightens the pathos of the scene. Gwynplaine has come back to Dea, who is dying from the shock of his disappearance.

"'Dea,' he says, 'all is arranged. We are

going to be happy. Don't drive me to despair. Dea! I have done nothing to you!" "These words were not spoken, but sobbed out. You felt in them a mingling of prostration and revolt. There issued from the bosom of Gwynplaine a groan that would have drawn

the doves to him, and a roar that would have

made the lions shrink back.

"Dea answered him in a voice more and more indistinct, pausing almost at every word. "Alas, 'tis useless, my well beloved! I see An hour ago I was you do what you can. longing to die, now I desire it no longer. Gwynplaine, my adored Gwynplaine, how very happy we have been! God had placed you in my life; He takes me away from yours. You will remember the green box, will you not? and your poor little blind Dea. You will remember that song of mine. Don't forget the sound of my voice, and the way I used to say, I love you. I shall come back to tell you of it in the night when you are sleeping. We had found each other again, but the joy was too great. It had to come to an end immediately,'" &c.

If 'L'Homme qui rit' made us fear the veteran had outwritten himself, since the appearance of his admirable 'Quatrevingt-treize,' we have been eager for another novel from his pen. Yet ' Quatrevingt-treize is all thought and action, with very little sentiment; and the most of the sentiment there is, is born either of masculine friendship, of the profound instincts of maternity, or of the rough devotion of a savage soldiery to the helpless infants they have taken for their playthings. Strange to say, the nearest approach to a young and attractive female in the book is the vivandière of a red battalion of Paris. Nobody falls in love with anybody else; and Gauvain, the youthful and chivalrous hero, has given himself over to his principles, his duty, and la patrie. At the same time, there is no lack of interest, and the interest seldom flags. The scheme of the book is the development of the conflicting forces of the old régime and the Revolution. On the one side are loyalty and the haughty spirit of the feudal seigneurie embodied in Lantenac; on the other, progress and the cause of humanity, championed by Gauvain and the iron-souled Cimourdain. As for the rank and file of the combatants, they are but the pawns on the great chess-board, set in motion by the conflicting dictatorship of remote intelligences. The mass of the Royalists are directed by the émigrés, and by their English allies,-according to Victor Hugo; those of the Re

publicans by that terrible triumvirate in Paris, who hold their stormy meetings in a room in a café. It is true that Hugo, with some reason, endows the opposing armies with different degrees of understanding. He makes the ignorant peasants stand desperately in their defence against the vindication of their actual interests, with those blindly combative instincts that are in one sense bestial. While the Parisian recruits of the Republic of Terror have had their understandings enlightened by the demagogues of the capital; and possibly they might act as they think for themselves, were it not for the pressure of a relentless discipline, and the presence of those civil representatives, who are virtually the delegates of the guillotine. Yet, on the whole, we may honestly confess that he holds a fairly even balance. It is not in his nature to be unjust to loyalty and devotion, whatever may be the political ideas they advocate; and his Marquis of Lantenac, when all has been said, is perhaps the most sublime figure in the pages of the novel. Here, too, his subject is so comprehensive, that he can hardly avoid studying concentration. No one of his episodes can be condemned as irrelevant; and although those inevitable digressions of his may sometimes be tedious, yet they seldom fail to converge upon his points.

He is in his element when he takes us on a survey of the ground that is covered by the strategy of that strange campaign. Such strongholds as the forts of Brest and L'Orient were garrisoned by the forces of the Republic; but the real defences of Brittany lay in its trackless forests. Stretching for leagues on leagues in a tangle of inextricable thickets, each of these had to be cerné and guarded, if the communications of the Republican advance were to be secured. You may say for once that you had a forest-war, that was waged by mine and countermine. For additional security the peasant irregulars burrowed away below ground. Vast subterraneous caverns were excavated, and the issues from them were carefully and artistically sealed. The covert might be closely beaten without discovering a sign of an enemy; yet whenever the exploring force had withdrawn, the insurgent leader had but to send round

the signal, and the forest was swarming with armed men. The whole of the warfare was a heroic epic, where the assaillants exposed themselves to mysterious dangers, with extermination for the inevitable penalty of their defeat. Nothing could be more ruthless than all the conditions; and their author elaborately shows how passions had been embittered to the utmost. But his picture, which it must have been difficult indeed to overcharge, places the formidable qualities of his gallant countrymen in a far more powerful and effective light than those rhapsodies in which it is his pleasure to indulge apropos of nothing in particular.

He shows himself a master of contrast, too, in the studies of the three infants who play so conspicuous a part in the story. The most ferocious of the combatants, flushed with bloodshed and the thirst for revenge, submit themselves to the commanding power of helpless and unconscious innocence. Infants as they are, and the children of an ignorant peasant woman, he shows his affectionate experience of the childish nature by giving each a distinct individuality that interests. Listen, for example, to the fragments of talk of the hapless vivandière, who is treading on the very brink of her grave, as she threads her way through the thickets with the mother and the babes.

René-Jean ran up.

"Gros-Alain resumed, ' It bites.'

"Don't hurt it,' said René-Jean.

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And both of them set to work to watch the passenger (passant).

As for Georgette, she had finished her soup. She was looking after her brother. René-Jean and Gros-Alain were in the recess of a window, stooping down and serious over the wood-louse. Their foreheads touched, and their locks tumbled through each other's. They held their breath in wonder, and regarded the insect, that had come to a stop and did not stir, anything but gratified by so much admiration.

"Georgette, seeing her brothers in contemplation, longed to know what was the matter. It was far from easy getting to them; how ever, she undertook it. The passage bristled with difficulties. There were lots of things lying on the ground-footstools upset, piles of paper, packing-boxes, unnailed and empty, trunks, heaps of one kind or another, round which she must pick her way-a whole archipelago of shoals. Georgette ventured it. She began by getting out of her cradle-the first labor. Then she engaged herself among the reefs, wound her way through the narrows, crawled between a couple of chests, passed over a pile of papers, clinging fast to one side, rolling over on the other," &c., &c.

It is the almost miraculous rescue of these children that gives us the measure of the grandeur of Lantenac, and excites a human sympathy in his fate. Hitherto admiration has been overpowered by repulsion. The veteran roué become the terrible leader of guerillas, has scarcely redeemed the fredaines of his youth and manhood by the prowess of his almost superhuman inflexibility. His royalist principles are a fetish to which he sacrifices remorselessly. He does the greater violence to our sense of humanity, that he has chosen his own ancestral domains as the theatre of some of his most ruthless actions. It is true that he is as regardless of his own life as of the lives of others; but, after all, almost as much can be said for nineteen-twentieths of the rude peasants who have eagerly answered his call to arms. If he has a trace of ordinary humanity about him, as yet we have seen no sign of it. His only conceivable excuse must be, NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXVI., No. 4

that he is the champion of a great but desperate cause, while he has satisfied himself that his only chance of victory lies in showing himself consistently relentless. All at once he is face to face with a dilemma. It rests with him, and with him alone, to save the lives of three innocent children; but their salvation involves the sacrifice of himself. That direct consideration weighs for nothing with him. But the sacrifice of himself is treason to the cause whose success seems inextricably bound up in his safety. Nay, more; should he show weakness now and compromise his mission, all the former deeds he has done on á principle, must change their character and become crimes that might have been avoided. The conflict in that stern and conscientious nature is rather indicated than analysed. But there is short space left for decision, and the turmoil by which he was agitated must have been the more violent for its brevity. It is hard to say whether he

showed himself consistent in the resolution he came to; but happily the most austere of men have their passing moments of gentleness; and when Lantenac comes down through the flames holding the infants in his arms, we feel at once that the chief we had taken for a monster, has been brought within the pale of our sympathies and the category of our fellow-creatures.

His kinsman Gauvain, head of a younger branch of their house, the man of those new ideas to which he gives the humane interpretation of a chivalrous soldier, is what Lantenac might have been with a different training. By the ironie sanglante of the civil war the nephew is opposed in mortal combat to the uncle who had played with him as a boy. These old family memories have half faded from the recollections of the hard old worldling, though they are revived on occasion when he is taunting the other. Each of the chiefs proscribes the leader of the opposing forces--one with the courteous though cruel circumlocution of the aristocratic régime, the other with the blunt abruptness of the executioners of the Republic. And probably, though Gauvain is ill-regarded at Paris on account of his clemency, and though he has only been left in his command because of his skill and daring, he

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