tter than a real--a fantastic
resurrection of Old Paris; and, above all, an atmosphere of "sunset and
eclipse," of night and thunder and levin-flashes, which no one of
catholic taste would willingly surrender. Only, ungrateful as it may
seem, uncritical as some may deem it, it is impossible not to sigh,
"Oh! why were not the best things of this treated in verse, and why were
not the other things left alone altogether?"

[Sidenote: The thirty years' interval.]

For a very long stretch of time--one that could hardly be paralleled
except in a literary life so unusually extended as his--it might have
seemed that one of those _voix interieures_, which he was during its
course to celebrate in undying verse, had whispered to Hugo some such
warning as that conveyed in the words of the close of the last
paragraph, and that he, usually the most indocile of men, had listened
to it. For all but three decades he confined his production--at least in
the sense of substantial publication[101]--to poetry almost invariably
splendid, drama always grandiose and sometimes grand, and prose-writing
of a chiefly political kind, which even sympathisers (one would suppose)
can hardly regard as of much value now if they have any critical
faculty. Even the tremendous shock of disappointment, discomfiture, and
exile which resulted from the success of Napoleon the Third, though it
started a new wave and gust of oceanic and cyclonic force, range, and
volume in his soul, found little prose vent, except the wretched stuff
of _Napoleon le Petit_, to chequer the fulgurant outburst of the
_Chatiments_, the apocalyptic magnificence of the _Contemplations_, and
the almost unmatched vigour, variety, and vividness of the _Legende des
Siecles_.

At last, in 1862, a full decade after the cataclysm, his largest and
probably his most popular work of fiction made its appearance in the
return to romance-writing, entitled _Les Miserables_. I daresay
biographies say when it was begun; it is at any rate clear that even
Victor Hugo must have taken some years, especially in view of his other
work, to produce such a mass of matter.[102] Probably not very many
people now living, at least in England, remember very clearly the
immense effect it produced even with us, who were then apt to regard
Hugo as at best a very chequered genius and at worst an almost
charlatanish rhetorician.

[Sidenote: _Les Miserables._]

It was no doubt lucky for its popularity that it fell i