n with a general
movement, in England as well as elsewhere, which had with us been, if
not brought about, aided by influences in literature as different as
those of Dickens and Carlyle, through Kingsley and others
downwards,--the movement which has been called perhaps more truly than
sympathetically, "the cult of the lower [not to say the criminal]
classes." In France, if not in England, this cult had been oddly
combined with a dash of rather adulterated Romanticism, and long before
Hugo, Sues and Sands, as will be seen later, had in their different
manner been priests and priestesses of it. In his own case the adoption
of the subject "keyed on" in no small degree to the mood in which he
wrote the _Dernier Jour_ and _Claude Gueux_, while a good deal of the
"Old Paris" mania (I use the word nowise contumeliously) of _Notre-Dame_
survived, and even the "Cour des Miracles" found itself modernised.

Whether the popularity above mentioned has kept itself up or not, I
cannot say. Of one comparatively recent edition, not so far as I know
published at intervals, I have been told that the first volume is out of
print, but none of the others, a thing rather voiceful to the
understanding. I know that, to me, it is the hardest book to read
through of any that I know by a great writer. _Le Grand Cyrus_ and
_Clelie_ are certainly longer, _Clarissa_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_
are probably so. _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_ is almost as long. There are
finer things in it than in any of them, (except the deaths of Lovelace
and Porthos and the kidnapping of General Monk) from the pure novel
point of view, and not a few passages which ought to have been verse
and, even prose as they are, soar far over anything that Mademoiselle de
Scudery or Samuel Richardson or Alexandre Dumas could possibly have
written in either harmony. The Scudery books are infinitely duller, and
the Richardson ones much less varied.

But none of these others besets the path of the reader with things to
which the obstacles interposed by Quilp in the way of Sampson Brass were
down-pillows, as is the case with _Les Miserables_. It is as if Victor
Hugo had said, "You shall read this at your peril," and had made good
the threat by dint of every blunder in novel-writing which he could
possibly commit. With his old and almost invariable fault (there is a
little of it even in _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_, and only
_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ avoids it entirely), he delays any real