ddle life, it stands midway between his earlier poetry with its more
lyric note and his later work with its deeper and more prophetic tones.
In point of expression the poet's powers had attained their full
development; he has perfect command of rime; the versification is free
and shows no trace of the stilted style of his first volumes; the
language is copious and eloquent, but exhibits few signs of that
verbosity and tendency to vain repetition which, as has been already
remarked, marred some of his later poetry. In the _Legende_, no
doubt, are a thousand extravagances, _bizarreries_, anachronisms, and
negligences. But the greatest poet is not, like the greatest general, he
who makes fewest mistakes, but he who expresses the noblest and truest
feeling in the noblest and truest language. So judged, the _Legende_
will take its place amongst the best that the nineteenth century
produced in poetry.

G. F. BRIDGE.

LONDON, _March_, 1907.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Victor-Marie Hugo, son of an officer in Napoleon's army, was born
at Besancon on February 26, 1802. He spent a roving and unsettled
childhood, for wherever the father was sent the mother and children
followed. The first three years of his life were spent in Elba, where he
learnt to speak the Italian dialect spoken in the island in addition
to his mother tongue. Then for three years the family was in Paris and
Victor got a little education in a small school. But in 1805 the father
was appointed to a post in the army of Naples, and in the autumn of 1807
his wife and children joined him at Avellino. Two years later General
Hugo was invited by Joseph Bonaparte to fill an important position in
the kingdom of Spain, and, desirous that his sons should receive a good
education, he sent his family to Paris, where his wife chose for their
home the house in the Rue des Feuillantines which has been so
charmingly described by the poet in the lines _Ce qui se passait aux
Feuillantines_. There he learnt much from an old soldier, General
Lahorie, who, obnoxious to Napoleon for the share he had taken in
Moreau's plot, lived secretly in the house, and from an old priest named
Lariviere, who came every day to teach the three brothers. There too
he played in the garden with the little Adele Foucher, who afterwards
became his wife. But this quiet home life did not last long. In 1811
Madame Hugo set off to join her husband at Madrid, and the boys went
with her. At Madrid they w