to provoke an exaggeration of those mannerisms of thought no less than of phrase, which though never ignoble nor paltry, yet now and then take something from the loftiness and sincerity of the writer’s work.  Wisdom, however, is justified of her children, and M. Hugo’s genius has justified his choice of a difficult and perilous subject. Quatrevingt-treize is a monument of its author’s finest gifts; and while those who are happily endowed with the capacity of taking delight in nobility and beauty of imaginative work will find themselves in possession of a new treasure, the lover of historic truth who hates to see abstractions passed off for actualities and legend erected in the place of fact escapes with his sensibilities almost unwounded.

The historic interlude at the beginning of the second volume is undoubtedly open to criticism from the political student’s point of view.  As a sketch of the Convention, the scene of its sittings, the stormful dramas that were enacted there one after another for month after month, the singular men who one after another rode triumphant upon the whirlwind for a little space, and were then mercilessly in an instant swept into outer darkness, the commoner men who cowered before the fury of the storm, and were like “smoke driven hither and thither by the wind,” and laboured hard upon a thousand schemes for human improvement, some admirable, others mere frenzy, while mobs filed in and danced mad carmagnoles before them—­all this is a magnificent masterpiece of accurate, full, and vivid description.  To the philosophy of it we venture to demur.  The mystic, supernatural view of the French Revolution, which is so popular among French writers who object to the supernatural and the mystical everywhere else, is to us a thing most incredible, most puerile, most mischievous.  People talk of ’93, as a Greek tragedian treats the Tale of Troy divine, or the terrible fortunes of the house of Atreus, as the result of dark invincible fate, as the unalterable decree of the immortal gods.  Even Victor Hugo’s strong spirit does not quite overcome the demoralising doctrine of a certain revolutionary school, though he has the poet’s excuse.  Thus, of the Convention:—­

“Minds all a prey to the wind.  But this wind was a wind of miracle and portent.  To be a member of the Convention was to be a wave of the ocean.  And this was true of its greatest.  The force of impulsion came from on high.  There was in the Convention a will, which was the will of all, and yet was the will of no one.  It was an idea, an idea resistless and without measure, which breathed in the shadow from the high heavens.  We call that the Revolution.  As this idea passed, it threw down one and raised up another; it bore away this man in the foam, and broke that man to pieces upon the rocks.  The idea knew whither it went, and drove the gulf of waters before it.  To impute the Revolution to men is as one who should impute the tide to