He is not ten years "Ah! Sir, my little John is a man to me. old, and he already takes his father's place; now works, and now sings, so pleasantly; he is the first to wake in the morning, and is the last to go to rest, after singing all day. But for our John, my husband and I must have died this winter, of hunger, and of grief caused by the other child.' "You have another child, good woman?' rejoined Anatole ; ' and pray what has he done, to cause you so much sorrow?' "Alas!' replied the boat-woman, 't is a long story. My elder son was a priest, Sir; he is one no longer, and now we know not what to do with him.' "And how did this happen;' said the young man, 'pray tell me, for I am deeply interested about it.' "Pride has been our ruin, Sir. You may see, from this spot, that small white house, near the willow-plantation. We inherited that house, and five acres of good land; we might have been rich with these; but I had a notion of making my Ambrose a parish priest; I wished that men should bow to my son, that he should dine occasionally at the castle, that he should say mass. We sold this pretty house, and these five acres of land, that our child might study; he read all the books, he was already shorn, he was on the point of being made a parish priest somewhere, when a great misfortune happened to him, poor child! For, mind, Sir, I cannot believe he was guilty; he was a young man, but brave and honest; he had never treated his father disrespectfully, and he always dined with me in the holydays. Oh accursed black dress, how much evil have you brought upon us!' "Here the poor woman burst into tears; then continued her story, finding that Anatole was still listening to her. "Last Autumn, there was a plentiful fishing-season; the fair brought our ferry-boat so much custom, that we had laid up, my husband, little John, and I, twelve good crowns. Wife," said my poor husband, one evening; an evening when the wind blew hard, the river roared, and the yellow leaves beat against our windows; "wife," said he, "here are twelve good crowns to help us through the winter, what shall we do with these twelve crowns? "John made no answer, neither did I ; my son and I had already disposed of this money, in our own minds. """Perhaps," resumed my good man, finding that we made no answer, "perhaps we should do well to buy a pig, of neighbour John Pied; the young pig would be just the thing for us; it is large, and fat, and just fit to be killed; we will salt it, we will smoke it, and this winter, at least, we will enjoy our meals, and not be reduced to the miserable fare of the last. I speak not on my own account, wife, but for you, and our little John, who is growing, and ought to eat a little meat every day." "This last argument made me feel badly; my youngest child had suffered so much, that I could not say a word in reply; but John quickly said; """Father, don't buy John Pied's pig; I live very well without eating meat; every body says I am as large as you! I can tell you, if you will let me, what you should do with the twelve crowns." "What?" said my poor man, "what? if not to make ourselves a little more comfortable; to buy you a new jacket, my half-naked boy, and your mother a pair of shoes, and myself a little brandy, to warm me when I am fishing, up to my knees in water?" "I dared not reply to the reasoning of my poor husband, but John came to my aid. 66666 Father," said he, rising, my elder brother is a priest, but he has not a black dress, he has not a three-cornered hat. We must buy him a three-cornered hat and a black dress. We will live on bread this one winter more, and my mother will mend my jacket." "Oh God! how beautiful John looked, as he said this! It makes me weep, even now, Sir. Son," said his father, "I will refuse you nothing but this black dress. These twelve crowns shall be for you, for your mother and me; for your mother and you, my child, and for your father. Your brother is well-fed, warmly clad; he has a bed and sheets and as many blankets as he needs. We lie on straw, with only our summer clothes to cover us. He fasts during forty days only; we fast all the year round; and should be glad to dine on Sunday, as he does on his fast-days. Do not speak to me of this dress and hat; do not speak of them! wife, I will not hear of them." """Alas!" said I to my good man, "he wants only this dress and hat to make him a priest. Only this one sacrifice, my husband, only one winter more. Would you rather see a bit of bacon over your chimney, than to see your son seated above the choir in the church and pronouncing his benediction on you?" """Yes, father," resumed John, "my brother is despised. They ask him, where his dress is. He must have a dress; father, give him the twelve crowns. 66 6 His father continued; "If I give him the twelve crowns, we must die. Take these twelve crowns, John, take them, I give them to you, and not to your brother; your brother has ruined us; for him, we have sold your uncle Robin's vineyard, and my brother Richard's house and vineyard. Our whole fortune has gone to the Seminary. You will see me, my son, forced to sell my nets and my ferry-boat!" Then turning to me, he said, "Wife, wife, we shall have a priest at our death bed, perhaps." He then drew the twelve crowns from under his straw bed, and counted them, one by one, sighing as he counted eleven. "He paused at the twelfth crown-piece. """John," said he, "this crown shall be yours; I will spend it for you, John; you shall buy yourself some cake, some sugar-plums, some Tours prunes, some barley-candy, a knife with a cork-screw, and all sorts of nice things. Your brother's baubles cost more, my son. Here, take this crown; let it not be said that you alone waste none of our money; spend something, John, that your brother may not blush too deeply. Here, my son, go to the fête, you shall dance, and give two pence for a country-dance." And my poor husband took his son in his arms, kissed him, weeping and still holding his last crown-piece. "Oh! Sir, it costs very dear to be a priest! They say to parents, It will cost you nothing, yet something is to be paid, continually; we must give our poor money to a man in black, who does not even thank us, and live on bread, and let our boat go leaky.' "At the same time, the poor woman laid down one of her oars, that she might bail out the water which had found its way through the seams of the boat." Having said thus much on the subject of Janin, we shall despatch, in a very few words, what we have to mention of his other works. All of them indicate a fervid and passionate imagination, a most defective judgment and taste, and an inability, as it seems to us, of constructing or maturing any great plan; and that fatal defect, against which none declaims more loudly than himself, a want of any settled principle, be it in religion, politics, or morals. No one can look at his works without perceiving the high probability of what we believe to be the fact, that Janin has written, or is prepared to write, in any journal, on any side of any question, not so much from interested motives, as because no one side seems to him to have any very decided preference over the other. His earliest work, L'Ane Mort et la Femme Guillotinée was one of those hideous imbroglios of blood, disease, and voluptuousness, which might be supposed to have occurred to the imagination of a mad butcher in Bedlam. The Confession, to which we have already alluded, was followed by Barnave, a very unfinished and defective, yet bold and striking sketch from the French Revolution, taken at that moment, as he himself expresses it, "when the ancient monarchy and the ancient people parted, never again to meet and recognise each other, so greatly would emigration change the former, and conquest the latter." Of the Contes Fantastiques and the Contes Nouveaux, his two last productions, we regret we can say nothing favorable. Even considered as tales or sketches, and without reference to their pretensions to any peculiar character, they by no means rise above the usual rate of contributions to the Annuals; nor, with the exception of the tale entitled Rosette, in the Contes Fantastiques, and the Essay on Crebillon the Younger, in the Contes Nouveaux, is there any of them which appears worthy of Janin's reputation. If we had been attempting an arrangement of these French novelists according to their merits, assuredly Janin would not have occupied the first place in the list. That must have been, without hesitation, awarded to Victor Hugo, who, though still young, has already distinguished himself in almost every walk of imaginative literature;-disputing the prize of lyric poetry with Lamartine, in his Odes, his Orientales, and Feuilles d'Automne; occupying one of the most eminent positions on the stage, by his Cromwell, Hernani, Marion de l'Orme, Le Roi s'amuse, and Lucrèce Borgia; and indisputably at the head of romance, since the publication of his Notre Dame de Paris. Superior to his contemporaries in creative imagination,— being in fact the only one of them who seems to see his way with some clearness, or to possess the power of inventing, brooding over, and working out with patience one leading view, superior to them even in that particular in which their strength lies, mere power of painting and description; he is yet more visibly elevated above their sphere of inspiration by the purer spirit with which his works, as a whole, have been animated, the generous sympathy for goodness and devotion of every kind which he evinces, and the absence of those querulous doubts, those contradictory and self-neutralizing views by which in their works the reader is harassed. In many respects, indeed, he might be referred to as being "among them, but not of them," - an exception from, rather than an illustration of, the spirit of his time. Still, unfortunately, he remains connected with it by sufficient ties to identify him as one of those who have written during a century of confusion; nay, whose own example, however unconsciously, may have tended to increase the perplexity. And comparing his earlier tales, - Hans d'Islande, and Bug Jargal, in which, amidst all the horrors in which they deal, a spirit of humanity, a fine sensibility to virtue and nobleness, always left the mind something to repose upon with satisfaction, with his !ater works, particularly his Dramas of Le Roi s'amuse, and Lucrèce Borgia, in which scarcely any humane or generous emotion leavens the mass of licentiousness, incest, and murder, in which they deal, we regret to think, that, instead of disengaging himself more and more from the evil influences of his day, they seem rather to be acquiring a firmer hold over his mind; as if the moral barometer had begun to sink at last under the pressure of the loaded atmosphere which surrounded it, and the index which once pointed to calm and sunshine, were now likely to waver for a time between deluge and storm. We trust, however, this anticipation may not be realized. It is not for a man of Hugo's great and varied talent, to copy the mock misanthropy, and distrust of goodness, which we regret to see so generally affected by La Jeune France. It is never a pleasing sight to see misanthropy, the painful privilege of age, invading the province of youth;-to see the heart wrinkled before the brow. But it is doubly disagreeable, when we have reason to suspect that the author is not a whit more sincere in his misanthropy than in any thing else; and that this mask, like any other, is merely put on for the sake of effect. Nature herself forbade to Victor Hugo the gloomy walk of indifference, callousness, or cynicism, and pointed out to him the sunny path of enthusiasm, hope, and sympathy, as that alone where he ought to wander. Hugo's works have been so long before the public, and are already so far known in England, that any detailed accounts of them would now be out of place. The first, Hans of Iceland, is a northern romance, in which the youthful novelist has turned to great account the savage wilds, gloomy lakes, stormy seas, pathless caves, and ruined fortresses of Scandinavia. A being savage as the scenery around him,— human in his birth, but more akin to the brute in his nature; diminutive, but with a giant's strength; whose pastime is assassination, who lives literally as well as metamorphically on blood, -is the hero; and round this monster are grouped some of the strangest, ghastliest, and yet not wholly unnatural beings which it is possible for the imagination to conceive, Spiagudry, the keeper of the dead-house or Morgue of Drontheim, and Orugex, the state executioner; — while gentler forms, the noble and persecuted Schumacher, and the devoted and innocent Ethel, relieve the monotony of crime and horror. Hugo's second romance, Bug Jargal, a tale of the insurrection in St. Domingo, was never much to our taste. The essential improbability of such a character as Bug Jargal, a negro of the noblest moral and intellectual character, passionately in love with a white woman, yet tempering the wildest passion with the deepest respect, and sacrificing even life at last in her behalf and that of her husband, is too violent a call upon the imagination; but laying aside the defects of the plot, considered as a whole, we fancy there is no reader of the tale, who can forget the entrancing interest of the scenes in the camp of the insurgent chief Biassou, or the death-struggle between Habibrah and D'Auverney, upon the brink of the cataract. The latter, in particular, is drawn with such intense force, that the reader seems almost to be a witness of the changing fortunes of the fight, and can hardly breathe freely till he comes to the close. Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné, has no pretensions to the character of a regular tale, yet, in its way, it is perhaps the most perfect thing which Hugo has yet produced. Like the Confessions of an Opium-Eater, it is merely the picture of a peculiar state of mind; the exciting cause in the one case being opium, -in the other, the certainty of an approaching death by the guillotine. Hugo, like Sterne, has taken a single captive, shut him up in his dungeon, and "then looked through the twilight of the grated |