be just to those nearer us in rank and mind.
Such at least is the fact, which other critics may explain. For these
were all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I did not
love the men, my love was the greater to their books. I had read them
and lived with them; for months they were continually in my thoughts; I
seemed to rejoice in their joys and to sorrow with them in their griefs;
and behold, when I came to write of them, my tongue was sometimes hardly
courteous and seldom wholly just.

R. L. S.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] "Gaudeamus: Carmina vagorum selecta." Leipsic: Truebner, 1879.

FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS

I

VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES

Apres le roman pittoresque mais prosaique de Walter Scott il restera
un autre roman a creer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous.
C'est le roman, a la fois drame et epopee, pittoresque mais poetique,
reel mais ideal, vrai mais grand, qui enchassera Walter Scott dans
Homere.--VICTOR HUGO on "Quentin Durward."

Victor Hugo's romances occupy an important position in the history of
literature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been
carried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinite
in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many things
have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and it
is only in the last romance of all, "Quatrevingt-treize," that this
culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men who
are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more
justly to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to
advance as it indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only
the measure of what is past. The movement is not arrested. That
significant something by which the work of such a man differs from that
of his predecessors goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and
more articulate and cognisable. The same principle of growth that
carried his first book beyond the books of previous writers carries his
last book beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production of
any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we
have sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be
the very weakest of an author's books that, coming in the sequel of many
others, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of
them--of that spinal marrow of signi