in fact—­and do unlikely things.  But this fault is the fault of a great nature, grandeur exalted into grandiosity, till the heroes of these plays, “Hernani,” “Marion Delorme,” “Le Roi d’Amuse,” loom and stalk across the scene like epic demigods of more than mortal stature and mortal passions.  But Hugo was not only a great dramatist and a great poet, but a most clever playwright.  “Hernani” is full of effective stage devices, crises in the action which make an audience hold its breath or shudder; moments of intense suspense like that in the third act, where the old hidalgo pauses before his own portrait, behind which the outlaw is hidden; or that in the fifth, where Hernani hears at first, faint and far away, the blast of the fatal horn that summons him to leave his bride at the altar and go to his death.  The young romantics of the day all got “Hernani” by heart and used to rehearse it at their assemblies, each taking a part; and the famous trumpet, the cor d’Hernani, became a symbol and a rallying call.

No such scene would have been possible in an English playhouse as that which attended the first representation of “Hernani” at the Theatre Francais.  For not only is an English audience comparatively indifferent to rules of art and canons of taste, but the unities had never prevailed in practice in England, though constantly recommended in theory.  The French had no Shakspere, and the English no Academy.  We may construct an imaginary parallel to such a scene if we will suppose that all reputable English tragedies from 1600 down to 1830 had been something upon the model of Addison’s “Cato” and Johnson’s “Irene”, or better still upon the model of Dryden’s heroic plays in rimed couplets; and that then a drama like “Romeo and Juliet” had been produced upon the boards of Drury Lane, and a warm spurt of romantic poetry suddenly injected into the icy current of classic declamation.

Having considered the chief points in which the French romantic movement differed from the similar movements in England and Germany, let us now glance at the history of its beginnings, and at the work of a few of its typical figures.  The presentation of “Hernani” in 1830 was by no means the first overt act of the new school.  Discussion had been going on for years in the press.  De Stendhal says that the classicists had on their side two-thirds of the Academie Francaise, and all of the French journalists; that their leading organ, however, was the very influential Journal des Debats and its editor, M. Dussant, the general-in-chief of the classical party.  The romanticists, however, were not without organs of their own; among which are especially mentioned Le Conservateur Litteraire, begun in 1819, Le Globe in 1824, and the Annales Romantiques in 1823, the last being “practically a kind of annual of the Muse Francaise (1823-24), which had pretty nearly the same contributors.”  All of these journals were Bourboniste, except Le Globe,