rs; they give him the
lie fiercely as they read. Lastly, we have here already some beginning
of that curious series of English blunders, that makes us wonder if
there are neither proof-sheets nor judicious friends in the whole of
France, and affects us sometimes with a sickening uneasiness as to what
may be our own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreign
tongues. It is here that we shall find the famous "first of the fourth,"
and many English words that may be comprehensible perhaps in Paris. It
is here that we learn that "laird" in Scotland is the same title as
"lord" in England. Here, also, is an account of a Highland soldier's
equipment, which we recommend to the lovers of genuine fun.

In "L'Homme qui Rit," it was Hugo's object to "denounce" (as he would
say himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England;
and this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the
two last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book. The
repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is
bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader at
the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as seriously as it
deserves. And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that,
here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The
constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing
could be more happily imagined, as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant
mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and
installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a
great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which
all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and
tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the
people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of
the pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horrible
laughter, stamped for ever "by order of the king" upon the face of this
strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to
the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;
and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: "If I am
vile, is it not your system that has made me so?" This ghastly laughter
gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness running
thro