so that to an indifferent person it might appear that the sufferers had received injury without the justification of a compensating advantage to any one. Thus, when Hadrian divided the whole of Italy into four districts, and placed each under the superintendence of a magistrate with proconsular power, the people, who by the arrangement obtained a more speedy and equitable administration of the laws, seemed hardly conscious of the results likely to ensue from such a change, while those who had thriven upon the ruinous custom of appeals to Rome inveighed bitterly against a reform which annihilated one of their great sources of profit.

But enough of these heart-sickening details. Our readers will, we are sure, excuse us for not entering further into these scenes of guilt and misery. Sufficient has been said to direct the student's attention to a work, which, though we should not recommend it to any one upon his first entering into this course of history, will be perused with pleasure by those who, having made the lives of the Roman emperors their study, wish to examine the subject in a higher and more philosophical point of view. The moral to be derived from the whole is most excellent and cannot be too often inculcated; it is, that the loss of civil liberty involves a destruction of every feeling which distinguishes man from the inferior parts of the creation, leaving his faculties to vegetate in indolence or become brutalized by sensuality; that public opinion, that most mighty engine of good or evil, when allowed to lie dormant, instead of operating as a check upon power, or suffered to waste its energies upon a wild applause of faction, may become one of the most subservient instruments of oppression, and even bow its neck to the ground ere the foot of the tyrant be prepared to trample on it. It is to this universal corruption that we ascribe the circumstance, that no where, except in the eastern world, can be found a throne disgraced for so long a period by such a succession of human monsters; Spain, indeed, has had her Philip, France her Charles, Russia her Catherine, and we our Stuarts, but in several of these there existed a few domestic virtues, which, in a moral point of view, may perhaps soften the atrocities and palliate the injustice of their public conduct; no where else has human nature exhibited a catalogue of criminals unredeemed by the exercise of a single good quality, except perhaps in the reigns of some of their successors, the popes of Rome, who, after a life passed in the perpetration of similar crimes, were not unfrequently, like them, canonized in mockery of an offended heaven.

ย .

ART. X.-Notre Dame de Paris. Par Victor Hugo. Cinquième Edition, revue et corrigée. Paris. 1831. 4 tom. 12mo. THE author of Han d'Islande and Bug Jargal has invented another being as extraordinary as the heroes of either of these celebrated romances. To Hans and Habibrah is now to be added Quasimodo. Notre Dame de Paris has already, within a few months of its publication, run through several editions; and as long as a taste remains for the extraordinary, or perhaps it should be called the tremendous, such works must be popular. They appeal to an appetite which is shared by the peer with the peasant. Victor Hugo is not a writer in whose hands the power of moulding the human sympathies is likely to lie idle. He is eloquent, his fancy is active, his imagination fertile; and passion, which gives life and energy to the conceptions of a writer, and which, acting upon ideas as fire does upon the parched woods of America, sets the whole scene in a flame, is in him readily roused. Hugo may be called an affected writer, a mannerist, or a horrorist, but he can never be accused of the great vice, in modern times, the most heinous of all-dullness. A volume of Hugo is an active stimulant. Some books, as critics above all men know, act upon the senses with the depressive effect of digitalis upon the action of the heart; some may be compared to tonics, and some unhappily to emetics: but the writings of our author are never deficient in the true sal volatile, prepared according to the best directions of the Parisian pharmacopeia, amongst the ingredients of which is never forgotten a decided dash of horror. The Morgue is the source of much of the inspiration of la jeune France. When we put together the prison, the gibbet, the pillory, the gallows, the dissecting-room, the hangman and the priest, the monster-criminal and the monsterbeauty, we shall have enumerated a considerable portion of the elements of the modern French romance. We nearly complete the list by adding an air of antiquity, assuming the language of the ancient chronicles, a monarch mad or cruel, an alchemist's laboratory, a monk or a soothsayer, and a minute and edifying description of the inconveniences of an ancient brothel. But it is not of much consequence, as regards at least the effect, what are the materials of romance, provided genius presides at the disposition of them.

In the novel before us, for instance, we can trace the greater part, both of the personages and the incidents which occur, to and the likeness to the inventions of many very obvious sources; English authors is so strong, that it will tempt some critics to accuse the author of imitation. Some men's ideas, and those not otherwise than men of genius, fall somewhat too readily into the

mould prepared by others. They are gifted with only partial originality. Fancy is sedulous in the conception of characteristic qualities; while the memory, active in the business of comparison, associates the new creation with remembered ideas, and thus kneads the compound into a form which bears a general resemblance to the productions of other men. Such similarities constantly present themselves in the writings of Hugo: we may very often perceive them in those of our own Bulwer. It cannot be called copying; it is conception under the lively impression of a very powerful parent mind. We have no doubt that Hugo, in both his poetry and his romance, is greatly indebted to English literature. In common with his countrymen, he has adopted the English plan of reanimating the dry bones of antiquity, and by an assiduous study of the records of history, infusing into a modern production the very spirit and language of a former age. But he has also particular obligations; he has adopted the gloom and mystery of Mrs. Radcliffe, the supernatural effects of Maturin, and the wild and unearthly personages which Walter Scott has given various examples of in such characters as Flibbertigibbet and Fenella. Descriptive scenery is common to the whole of the modern school of English romance, and it is no less characteristic of the writings of our author. In this respect, however, he has, in the story before us, introduced a novelty of a striking kind: its scenes lie chiefly in a cathedral, and all its incidents pass either in, on, or about it. His landscapes are of stone, his fields pavement, his figures carved heads and sculptured monsters.

Notre Dame de Paris is the history of a foundling exposed under the roof of the cathedral of that name, at the place appropriated for the reception of the illegitimates of the metropolis. The infant is an incipient monster whom every charitably disposed person eschews. He is, however, at length adopted by a character of extraordinary sanctity, the Archdeacon of Josas, Claude Frollo by name-a personage who performs a very principal part in the work. He is versed in all the learning of the times, and having soon exhausted the confined knowledge of his age, he is driven to the dark studies of alchemy and astrology, in which he of course loses himself. He manages, however, to combine great devotion with the black art; but fasting and praying, and the habits of the anchorite, cannot keep down the passions of the man. He by accident sees in the streets a gypsy girl pursuing her vocation in dancing and performing tricks for the gratification of the mob, and he becomes enamoured of her charms. But La Esmeralda is no common gypsy: grace is in all her movements, fascination in her manners; she is a fairy, a muse, a miracle of beauty, a beggar, a zingari-despised, defiled, adored and deified-the queen of her

tribe, and the enchantress of the multitude. It is this personage we have compared to the Fenella of Scott. As for the priest and alchemist, he is something between Dr. Faustus and the Father Ambrosio of Monk Lewis: he has the learning and the voluptuousness of both these heroes. Of this Claude Frollo, the adopted son is Quasimodo, who is the very antipodes of La Esmeralda, his ugliness and awkwardness being as her grace and beauty. He is of gigantic form, herculean strength, bow-legged, blind of one eye, his face frightfully seamed with the small-pox, a huge tooth sticks from his mouth, which mouth is laid by no means horizontally in his face; his hair was composed of red bristles, and on the right of his face, over his eye, grew an enormous wen. One thing alone was wanting to complete the picture, and it was supplied: he was deaf. He had been brought up in the cathedral, and had succeeded to the office of bell-ringer, in the discharge of which duty he took a most vehement pleasure. The noise of his bells was almost the only sound he could hear; their music to him was consequently sweeter than the violin of Paganini. A being of this sort was not born to be admired: the disgust, which the world took but little pains to disguise, produced its natural effect on his temper. Quasimodo did not feel much, but what he did was in spite the monster is malicious.

The main spring of the novel is the passion of the priest for La Esmeralda, his jealousy of his rivals, his hatred of the object, his mixture of persecution and adoration. At one time he betrays her into the hands of justice, at another he risks his life, and, what is more, his reputation for sanctity, in her defence. A very extraordinary rival springs up; it is no other than his own slave Quasimodo. An act of kindness and sympathy bestowed on the monster converts him into the humblest and most delicate, as well as the most ardent of the admirers of the Esmeralda; the exploits he performs in her service do not yield to the twelve labours of Hercules. Esmeralda is alike indifferent to the fervent passion of the arch-priest, and the faithful services of the giant slave. She has fixed her simple affection upon a captain of gendarmerie. Caught by a brilliant uniform and a handsome person, she throws herself, with all the headlong ardour of a southern beauty, into a violent attachment for a Captain Phoebus Chateaupers. Her passion is faithful and inextinguishable: she loves even to death. Trials attend her and a melancholy fate closes her story. She, the heroine, the lovely gipsy, is executed by Tristan l'Hermite, the provost-marshal of Louis XI., of whom we hear in Quentin Durward, for the murder of the very man she would have died to save, and who, such was the justice of the times, is so far from dead that he is himself married about

the time his gipsy is hanged. The priest and his scalding love end in destroying its object; for it is he who in a most critical moment plunges a poignard into his rival's side, an act for which the poor gipsy is accused, and for which she is tortured, persecuted, and gibbeted.

A number of scenes, in which these and many other incidents are developed, are certainly drawn with very considerable power. They are also, to use a phrase applied to the stage, exceedingly well got up; the costume of the time is preserved, and the antiquities of ancient Paris have been carefully studied, but the work is not, as in the writings of our Horace Smith, overwhelmed with masses of crude and undigested lore. A romance which springs from the brain of a man of genius may be compared to Adam in Paradise-all grace, animation, and power; if there be power in such works as those we have just alluded to, it is the power of such a being as Frankenstein created-a living lump of clumsy machinery.

The passages in which the author has produced the greatest impression are those in which Quasimodo figures as a principal actor, some of which we shall translate for the benefit of those who do not possess the original. But besides these there are many others which display great vigour of painting, and forcibly move the sympathies of the reader. Such are the descriptions of the trial and torture of poor Esmeralda—of the cour des miracles, a sort of Alsatia, the sacred resort of all the rogues and vagabonds of the metropolis of France, one of those retreats and asylums for iniquity encouraged under the wretched police of the cities of Europe during the middle ages-the character and description of the recluse Gudule-and the conversations of Louis XI. in the Bastile. But Quasimodo is, as we have said, the ornament (lucus a non lucendo) of the romance, and to him we shall turn our attention.

All the population of Paris had assembled in the cathedral of Notre Dame on occasion of some public ceremony, when it was proposed, by way of sport among the multitude, that they should elect a pape des fous, a functionary who appears to answer pretty closely to our lord of misrule. Over the door of the chapel of Louis XI. was an ornamental window of a stone frame: a pane of this was broken, and an opening appeared just the size of a human face, the stone mullions serving for an appropriate frame. The proprietor of the ugliest face that presented himself was elected pope for the day, and as the honour was coveted, the candidates were numerous. The moment of trial was when the face, placed in the broken pane, shone forth in all its monstrousness on the rolling mass of judges below. All who proposed to