the Penitent, who had betrayed her into the hands of justice, discovers her to be his own daughter. In power Hugo is never deficient; but certainly nothing in any of his former works is to be compared to his description of Notre Dame, and the mysterious adaptation, and preëstablished harmony, as it were, which seemed to exist between it and its monstrous child Quasimodo;- of the attack of the Truands (the Alsatians of Paris) upon the cathedral, and their repulse by the superhuman exertions of the bell-ringer;and finally, of that awful scene where the archdeacon, gazing down from the tower of Notre Dame upon the execution of his victim in the square beneath, is seized by Quasimodo,- who has now relapsed into the savage, since the destruction of the only being to whom his heart had opened, and hurled from a height of two hundred feet" plumb down " upon the pavement below. This description is terrible beyond conception. Every motion, every struggle of the wretched priest, every clutch of his nails, every heave of the breast, as he clings to the projecting spout which has arrested his fall; then the gradual bending of the spout itself beneath his weight; the crowd shouting beneath, the monster above him-weeping;-(for he had loved the priest, and only the fury of disappointed attachment had urged him to this crime;)-the victim balancing himself over the gulf, his last convulsive effort ere he resigns his hold, even the revolutions of his body as he descends, his striking on the roof, from which he glides off like a tile detached by the wind, and then the final crash and rebound upon the pavement,—all are portrayed with the most horrible minuteness and reality. Two other works are already announced by this indefatigable artist, Le Fils de la Bossue, and La Quinquengrogne, -in the latter of which, it is said, he proposes to do for the military architecture and manners of the middle ages, what he has so admirably performed, in Notre Dame, for the cathedral and sacerdotal. Eugène Sue is, or would wish to be, the Cooper of France,— the founder of a maritime school of romance; and he had the advantage, at least, of a field perfectly unoccupied. Even in our own country, prior to the appearance of Cooper's romances, how little had been done for the poetry of the sea! Trunnions and Hatchways, indeed, we had in abundance, the comic side of a naval life had been displayed with ample detail; but for its loftier and more tragic aspect,-its alternations of tempest and calm, of labor and listless idleness, of battle and giddy revelry, of bright moonlights and weary days, when mists obscure the sun,-what had been attempted? Almost nothing, save the Corsair of Byron. If in our own country, where so much naval enthusiasm prevailed, so little had been effected in this way, it may easily be imagined 4 VOL. III. NO. I. the French were still more defective in any literature of the kind; but it would seem as if the defect was now likely to be supplied by an over-production. The success of Cooper's romances (who, by the way, is regarded as a much greater personage on the continent than with us) has provoked a host of imitators, Sue, Corbières, Jal, and others, who will, in all probability, soon overwork the vein which has thus been opened. Of these, the only one of distinguished talent is the first, though it is of a kind for which we must confess our dislike, the talent of crowding horrors upon each other with such vehemence and rapidity, and of deepening these by intervening scenes of debauch, or ferocious gayety, in such a manner, that the reader, at once stimulated by curiosity, and repelled by disgust, lays down the book a dozen times in the course of its perusal, and yet feels himself again attracted to it as by a spell. If M. Sue's picture of the French marine be correct, one would think every ship was a floating Pandemonium, commanded and manned by the devil himself and his angels. On shipboard, massacres and piracies, robberies and rapes, brutal orgies and Thracian quarrels, imprecations and blasphemies, an atmosphere of sulphur, smoke, and wine vapors, decks strewed with carcasses and fragments of flesh; on shore, tornadoes, insurrections, assassinations, treasons, conflagrations, monstrous serpents introduced into a nuptial-chamber to strangle the bride upon her wedding-night, such are the indispensable accompaniments of M. Sue's Tales of the Sea! One would think his idea of the naval life had been taken from the actual atrocities which took place among the despairing, famishing, blaspheming crew of the Medusa, drifting on their raft in the midst of a tempestuous ocean. It would be unfair to deny to the author, at the same time, a large portion of comic talent, and some command of the pathetic, when he chooses to exercise it; which is an event of very unfrequent occurrence. Of his works, Plik et Plok, Atargull, La Salamandre, La Coucaratcha, (there may be others of a later date, for the author writes and prints with a rapidity most formidable to reviewers,) all resemble each other very closely in their general character. We think Atargull, the best, and La Salamandre the worst. Atargull is a West-Indian Zanga, and the outline of the tale (divested of the introductory histories of the slave-merchant Bénoît, and the pirate Brulart, which, clever as they are, particularly the former, have no more to do with the story of Atargull than with that of Job) is simply this: - Atargull is the favored slave of the amiable West-India planter Well, sharing, with a pet spaniel and a daughter, the affections of his master. He repays his attachment with a devotion which is unbounded. A hideous series of calamities, however, suddenly plunges the planter into ruin. His daughter, the beloved of his heart, is bit to death by a serpent in her bed-room on her wedding-night: her death is followed by that of her iutended husband and her mother; the crops of the planter are destroyed, the negroes and cattle carried off by disease, his habitation burned; and he himself, bankrupt in fortune, broken in heart, attended only by his faithful slave Atargull, whom no misfortune can separate from his beloved master, embarks for France. The slave toils for him, supports him by his labors, watches over the dying man, all whose faculties are fast failing him, with the apparent devotion of a son. Then, when at last stretched upon his death-bed, in his miserable apartment, on the fifth floor in the Rue Tirechape, and clasping the hand of Atargull in his own, the wretched planter just retains enough of sense to feel the pang which is about to be inflicted upon him, the slave bending over him, as Zanga does over the prostrate Alonzó, thunders in his ear, ""T was I that introduced the serpent into the apartment of your daughter; 't was I that caused the deaths of your wife and son-in-law; 't was I that poisoned your negroes and cattle, wasted your crops, burned your habitation! You caused my father to be executed for a crime of which he was guiltless, and thus I repay the obligation! "I hated, I despised, and I destroy!" We can devote but a few lines to some other names, deserving, however, of a more detailed and satisfactory notice. M. Paul Lacroix, better known under his assumed name of the Bibliophile Jacob, was probably the first who, by his Soirées de Walter Scott, introduced the imitation of the historical romance in France; and he has since followed up his first production by Les Deux Fores, Le Roi des Ribauds, and La Danse Macabre, in the same style; the latter one of the most nightmare compositions of plague, sorcery, blood, and voluptuousness, that we have ever read. His great erudition, and minute acquaintance with the literature, manners, and customs of the middle ages, joined to some power of conception and dramatic expression, always give to his romances a certain degree of interest; but still the want of any vigorous or original conception, will never allow him to occupy an exalted rank in the world of fiction. Latterly, however, he has shown by his Divorce, and his Vertu et Tempérament, — novels of the present day, that his field of observation has by no means been confined to former centuries, but that he has been an accurate and discriminating student of the opinions and moral evils of the perplexed and perplexing society by which he is surrounded. Michel Raymond (also, we believe, a nom de guerre) has presented us with three most powerful pictures of Parisian life in Les Maçons, Les Intimes, and the Contes de l'Atelier. It would be well for himself and his readers if his sensibilities were as just as they appear to be keen ;—his sympathy with virtue as obvious as the sarcastic and gloomy strength with which he can portray the deformities of vice. Balzac, the author of the Peau de Chagrin, Romans Philosophiques, and some thousand contributions to reviews and literary journals, is a writer whose cast of mind a good deal resembles that of Janin, with rather more of a masculine character. Could he be persuaded to concentrate his talents on one work, instead of wasting them on a crowd of trifling tales, he seems to us to possess most of the materials of an effective writer; with one sad want only, the want of any regard to decency in his delineations, a cynicism, which the example of others about him may render less remarkable, but which nothing, in a man of genius, can excuse. Of Paul de Koch, who now reigns in the stead of Pigault le Brun, the novelist of the Grisettes and Badauds of Paris, our readers have already heard enough of M. Rey-Dusseuil, with his endless host of romances, which are in truth political pamphlets in disguise, we hardly suppose they are desirous to hear any thing. We would willingly, however, have introduced to their notice some of the tales of Madame Girardin,* and those of M. Sand, which are written in a calmer, truer, and better spirit than those with which we have been occupied. But we fear we have already lingered too long over a subject which may hardly appear deserving of being treated so gravely, or at such length; and therefore, being somewhat in the situation of old Ariosto, "Poichè da tutti lati è pieno il foglio," we must postpone the consideration of these, and some others, to a more convenient season. * Le Lorgnon. of Delphine Gay. Un Marriage sous l'Empire, published under the name Indiana, Melchior. Valentin, [From "The Westminster Review, No. 37."] [The following article is not the review of any work, but simply a Life of Pym. The titles prefixed to it pro formâ, as it originally stands, are "1. The Journals of the House of Commons. 2. Pym's Speeches. Mus. Brit." It is a better connected account of his life than we have elsewhere seen; and contains some eloquent passages from his Speeches in Parliament which were new to us. — EDD.] ART. II. NOTWITHSTANDING the auspicious and important part acted by Pym in a drama which must be intensely interesting to all generations of mankind, few particulars respecting his private life have come down to us. These however, such as they are, it behoves the biographer to collect with care, and record with fidelity, as the memorials of a man whose services in the great cause of the emancipation and enlightenment of his species ought to be held in everlasting remembrance, and whose character belongs not to his country alone, but to every country, to all climes, and all ages. - John Pym was descended from a good family in Somersetshire, where he was born in the year 1584. In the beginning of the year 1599, the fifteenth year of his age, he became a gentleman-commoner of Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford. But he left the University without taking a degree, and went, as Wood* supposes, to one of the Inns of Court. It would not appear that his leaving Oxford without a degree was produced by any cause discreditable to him,—by irregularity of conduct, or by want of capacity or inclination for learning.† It seems indeed, at that period to have been a usual practice to leave the university without taking a degree. Hampden and Vane, as well as Pym, appear to have done so. Nor is this to be wondered at; for if those universities are at present little fitted to give men the education necessary to prepare them to become legislators and statesmen, they were at that time much less so. Even Milton, of his university at once "the glory and the shame," though he resided there till he took both his degrees (B. A. and M. A.), invariably expressed his dissatisfaction with the system pursued. The fact is, those universities, though extremely well adapted for the purpose which was the exclusive object of their original institution, the education namely of a Catholic priesthood, have never completely undergone the reformation, or change, if the word is * Ath. Ox. Vol. II. art. Pym. "He was admired," says Anthony à Wood in his quaint manner, "for his pregnant parts," by Charles Fitz-Geffery the poet, who styled the said Pym in 1601, Phœbi delicia, Lepos puelli, &c. Ath. Ox. II. |