ains distinctly that the name was a nickname, taken from the grunt
or growl (the word is in France applied to the well-known noise made by
a paviour lifting and bringing down his rammer) of the monster.

But that monster himself! A more impossible improbability and a more
improbable impossibility never conceived itself in the brain of even an
as yet failure of an artist. Han appears to have done all sorts of nasty
things, such as eating the insides of babies when they were alive and
drinking the blood of enemies when they were not dead, out of the skulls
of his own offspring, which he had extracted from _their_ dead bodies by
a process like peeling a banana: also to have achieved some terrible
ones, such as burning cathedrals and barracks, upsetting rocks on whole
battalions, and so forth. But the only chances we have of seeing him at
real business show him to us as overcoming, with some trouble, an infirm
old man, and _not_ overcoming at all, after a struggle of long duration,
a not portentously powerful young one. His white bear, and not he, seems
to have had the chief merit of despatching six surely rather incompetent
hunters who followed the rash "Kennybol": and of his two final
achievements, that of poniarding two men in a court of justice might
have been brought about by anybody who was careless enough of his own
life, and that of setting his gaol on fire by any one who, with the same
carelessness, had a corrupt gaoler to supply him with the means.

It would be equally tedious and superfluous to go through the minor
characters and incidents. The virtuous and imprisoned statesman
Schumacker, Ethel's father, excites no sympathy: his malignant and
finally defeated enemy, the Chancellor Ahlefeld, no interest. That
enemy's most _un_virtuous wife and her paramour Musdaemon--_the_
villain of the piece as Han is the monster--as to whom one wonders
whether he could ever have been as attractive as a lover as he is
unattractive as a villain, are both puppets. Indeed, one would hardly
pay any attention to the book at all if it did not hold a position in
the work of a man of the highest genius partly similar to, and partly
contrasted with, that of _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_. But _St. Irvyne_
and _Zastrozzi_ are much shorter than _Han d'Islande_, and Shelley,
whether by accident, wisdom (_nemo omnibus horis insanit_), or the
direct intervention of Apollo, never resumed the task for which his
genius was so obviously unsuited.