[32] Such as Eudore's early friendship at Rome, before the persecution
under Diocletian, with Augustine, who was not born till twenty years
later.

[33] See note above.

[34] There cannot be too much Homer in Homer; there may be too much
outside Homer.

[35] If one had only been Telemachus at this time! It would have been a
good "Declamation" theme in the days of such things, "Should a man--for
this one experience--consent to be Telemachus for the rest of his
life--and after?"

[36] In the original the word which I have translated "unbroken" is
_eternel_, and with the adjacent _eternite_ illustrates (as do
_tonnerre_ and _etonnante_ in Bossuet's famous passage on the death of
"Madame") one of the minor but striking differences between French and
English rhetoric. Save for some very special purpose, we should consider
such repetition a jingle at best, a cacophony at worst: they think it a
beauty.

CHAPTER II

PAUL DE KOCK, OTHER MINORS OF 1800-1830, AND NODIER

[Sidenote: The fate of popular minor novelists.]

The mediocre poet has had a hard fate pronounced against him of old; but
the minor novelist, perhaps because he is much more likely to get some
good things in his own time, has usually a harder lot still, and in more
than one way, after physical or popular death. In fact it may be said
that, the more popular he is in the one day, the more utterly forgotten
he is likely to be in the other. Besides the obvious facts that his
popularity must always have been gained by the adoption of some more or
less ephemeral fashion, and that plenty of his own kind are always ready
to take his place--doing, like the heir in the old story, all they can
to substitute _Requiescat in Pace_ for _Resurgam_ on his
hatchment--there is a more mechanical reason for his occultation. The
more widely he or she has been read the more certain either has been of
being "read to pieces."

[Sidenote: Examples of them.]

These fates, and especially the last, have weighed upon the minor French
novelists of the early nineteenth century perhaps even more heavily than
upon our own: for the circulating library was an earlier and a more
widely spread institution in France than in England, and the lower and
lowest middle classes were a good deal more given to reading, and
especially to "light" reading, there than here. Nor can it be said that
any of the writers to be now mentioned, with one possible and one
certain exception, is of