exception merely and one which
proves, inasmuch as it justifies, the cautions it defies.[123]

FOOTNOTES:

[93] Mr. Swinburne's magnificent paeans are "vatical" certainly, but
scarcely critical, save now and then. Mr. Stevenson wrote on the
Romances, but not on "the whole."

[94] See note in Vol. I. p. 472 of this _History_, and in the present
volume, _sup._ p. 40.

[95] These crazes were not in origin, though they probably were in
influence, political: Hugo held more than one of them while he was still
a Royalist.

[96] She is of course not really Spanish or a gipsy, but is presented as
such at first.

[97] Stated in the Preface to _Cromwell_, the critical division of his
fourfold attack on neo-Classicism, as _Les Orientales_ were the
poetical, _Hernani_ was the dramatic, and _Notre-Dame_ itself the
prose-narrative.

[98] It is scarcely excessive to say that this mixture of wilful temper
and unbridled theorising was the Saturnian influence, or the "infortune
of Mart," in Hugo's horoscope throughout.

[99] Unless anybody chooses to say that the gallows and the guillotine
are Hugo's monsters here.

[100] The failure of the riskiest and most important scene of the whole
(where her surrender of herself to Phoebus is counteracted by Frollo's
stabbing the soldier, the act itself leading to Esmeralda's
incarceration) is glaring.

[101] _Le Beau Pecopin_ in his _Rhine_-book is, of course, fairly
substantial in one sense, but it is only an episode or inset-tale in
something else, which is neither novel or romance.

[102] It must be four or five times the length of Scott's average, more
than twice that of the longest books with which Dickens and Thackeray
used to occupy nearly two years in monthly instalments, and very nearly,
if not quite, that of Dumas' longest and most "spun-out" achievements in
_Monte Cristo_, the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_ and _La Comtesse de Charny_.

[103] I am not forgetting or contradicting what was said above (page 26)
of Rene. But Rene _does_ very little except when he kills the
she-beavers; Marius is always doing something, and doing it offensively.

[104] The "Je ne sais pas lire" argument has more than once suggested to
me a certain historical comparison. There have probably never been in
all history two more abominable scoundrels for cold-blooded cruelty, the
worst of all vices, than Eccelino da Romano and the late Mr. Broadhead,
patron saint and great exemplar of Trade-Unionism. Br