dicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force.
And this has been done, not, as it would have been before, by the cold
and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward
realism, dealing only with the objective materials of art, and dealing
with them so masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come
before us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men
and maidens of customary romance.

The episode of the mother and children in "Quatrevingt-treize" is equal
to anything that Hugo has ever written. There is one chapter in the
second volume, for instance, called "_Sein gueri, coeur saignant_,"
that is full of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could be
more delightful than the humours of the three children on the day before
the assault. The passage on La Vendee is really great, and the scenes in
Paris have much of the same broad merit. The book is full, as usual, of
pregnant and splendid sayings. But when thus much is conceded by way of
praise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also,
somewhat heavy. There is here a yet greater over-employment of
conventional dialogue than in "L'Homme qui Rit"; and much that should
have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he
has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his
characters. We should like to know what becomes of the main body of the
troop in the wood of La Saudraie during the thirty pages or so in which
the foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a
woman and some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at
one place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that we can
summon up to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks they
ceased to steer the corvette while the gun was loose? Of the chapter in
which Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the less
said the better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have
been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue.
Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable
workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and
trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin
unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our
ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to
the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under t