cheance_
came, he played deep for the Republic in the game of life and death,
making the restoration of the empire an impossibility. But long before
the young orator challenged the empire, it was arraigned before the bar
of liberty and humanity by the great poet. From his lonely channel rock,
in the bitter grandeur of exile, Victor Hugo hurled the lightnings and
thunders of his denunciation at the political burglar of France and his
parasitical minions. Practical people laughed at him, not knowing that
he was more practical than they. They saw nothing but the petty present,
and judged everything by its immediate success. He was nourished by
sovereign principles, rooted in the depths of the human heart and
blossoming in its loftiest aspirations. He was a prophet who chanted his
own inspiration to the world, knowing that few would listen at first,
but assured that the message would kindle some hearts, and that the
living flame would leap from breast to breast till all were wrapt in
its divine blaze. He scorned the base successful lie and reverenced the
noble outcast truth, and he had unfaltering faith in the response which
mankind would ultimately make to the voice of their rightful lord. Great
he was as a poet, a romancer and a dramatist, but he was greatest as
a prophet. He lived to see his message justified and his principles
triumphant, and died at the ripe old age of eighty-three, amid the love
and reverence of the civilised world. We are not blind to his failings;
he had, as the French say, the defects of his qualities. But they do not
obscure his glory. His failings were those of other men; his greatness
was his own.

Victor Hugo, like Gambetta, was a Freethinker. We know he professed a
belief in God, but he had no theology. His God was Nature, suffused with
passion and ideality; and his conviction of "Some far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves," was only his faith in progress,
extended into the remotest future. He was a true Freethinker in his
grand assertion of the majesty of reason and conscience. He appealed
to the native dignity of the individual, and hated priestcraft with a
perfect hatred. Lacking humor himself, and brilliant without wit, he
could recognise these qualities in others, and he thought them as valid
as his own weapons against the dogmas of superstition. How fine was
his great word about Voltaire--"Irony incarnate for the salvation of
mankind." Like Gambetta, Victor Hugo is to b