life. They suffered from an over-boiling copious-

ness, the wildest fulness of blood, and their poetic creation was written breath, shouting for joy or sobbing with woe ; but Victor Hugo, with all the honour which I grant him, I must confess has something dead, uncanny, ghostly, grave-risen, vampyre-like in him. He does not awaken in- spiration in our hearts he sucks it out ; he does not win our feeling by poetic transfiguration, but terrifies it by repulsive grotesques. He suffers from death and horrors. A young lady with whom I am very intimate expressed herself recently as to this craving for horrors by Hugo's muse in very apt words. She said, " The muse of Victor Hugo reminds me of the eccentric princess who was determined to marry only the ugliest man alive, and so sent forth through the land a summons that all young men who were remarkably misshapen should on a certain day repair to the royal castle as candidates for marriage. As may be supposed there was a fine collection of cripples and grotesques, and one might have supposed that he had before him all the caricatures I mean characters of one of Hugo's novels. But Quasimodo bore the bell and took the bride home." l 1 Aber Quasimodo, fuhrte die Braut nach Hausc. A neat adaptation of the old proverb : Wer's yhiclc hat, der fuhret die Braut hdm, und wer's Rccht hat, der sckldft bci ihr. Also English. Translator.