promise or threaten deep political, economical, and social controversy, what we need to do is to induce our people to weigh and consider.  We want them to cultivate energy without impatience, activity without restlessness, inflexibility without ill-humour.  I am not going to preach to you any artificial stoicism.  I am not going to preach to you any indifference to money, or to the pleasures of social intercourse, or to the esteem and good-will of our neighbours, or to any other of the consolations and necessities of life.  But, after all, the thing that matters most, both for happiness and for duty, is that we should strive habitually to live with wise thoughts and right feelings.  Literature helps us more than other studies to this most blessed companionship of wise thoughts and right feelings, and so I have taken this opportunity of earnestly commending it to your interest and care.

VICTOR HUGO’S “NINETY-THREE.”

“History has its truth, Legend has its truth.  Legendary truth is of a different nature from historic truth.  Legendary truth is invention with reality for result.  For the rest, history and legend have the same aim—­to paint under the man of a day eternal humanity.”  These words from his new and latest work (ii. 4) are a repetition of what Victor Hugo had already said in the introduction to his memorable Legend of the Ages[1].  But the occasion of their application is far more delicate.  Poetry lends itself naturally to the spacious, distant, vague, highly generalised way of present and real events.  A prose romance, on the other hand, is of necessity abundant in details, in special circumstances, in particularities of time and place.  This leaves all the more room for historic error, and historic error in a work of imagination dealing with actual and known occurrences is obviously fatal, not only to legendary truth, but to legendary beauty and poetic impressiveness.  And then the pitfalls which lie about the feet of the Frenchman who has to speak of 1793,—­the terrible year of the modern epoch!  The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call histories of the Revolution, or lives of this or that actor in it.

[Footnote 1:  The references are to the “Edition Definitive” in two volumes.]

It was hardly a breach, therefore, of one’s allegiance to Hugo’s superb imaginative genius, if one had misgivings as to the result of an attempt, even in his strong hands, to combine legend with truth on a disastrous field, in which grave writers with academic solemnity had confounded truth with the falsest kind of legend.  The theme was so likely to emphasise the defects incident to his mighty qualities; so likely