them by with less than careful and sympathetic study: for without moral sympathy no care will enable a student to form any but a trivial and a frivolous judgment on writings which make their primary appeal to the conscience—to the moral instinct and the moral intelligence of the reader. They may perhaps not improperly be classed, for historic or biographic interest, with the Littérature et Philosophie mêlées which had been given to the world in 1834. From the crudest impressions of the boy to the ripest convictions of the man, one common quality informs and harmonizes every stage of thought, every phase of feeling, every change of spiritual outlook, which has left its mark on the writings of which that collection is composed; the quality of a pure, a perfect, an intense and burning sincerity. Apart from this personal interest which informs them all, two at least are indispensable to any serious and thorough study of Hugo's work: the fervent and reiterated intercession on behalf of the worse than neglected treasures of mediaeval architecture then delivered over for a prey to the claws of the destroyer and the paws of the restorer; the superb essay on Mirabeau, which remains as a landmark or a tidemark in the history of his opinions and the development of his powers. But the highest expression of these was not to be given in prose—not even in the prose of Victor Hugo.
There is not, it seems to me, in all this marvellous life, to which well nigh every year brought its additional aureole of glory, a point more important, a date more memorable, than the publication of the Châtiments. Between the prologue Night and the epilogue Light the ninety-eight poems that roll and break and lighten and thunder like waves of a visible sea fulfil the choir of their crescent and refluent
