Hugo and Dumas are as well known to us as Scott and Dickens. Who has not read “Les Miserables” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “The Toilers of the Sea”; “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers”? “The Devil’s Pool,” “Mauprat” and “The Little Fadette” by George Sand have been English literature these many years. So, too, have “Eugénie Grandet” and “Le Père Goriot” by Balzac, the first of the great French realists whose work has come to us directly in translation and indirectly through the English and American writers whom they have influenced. As for later French fiction we can trust to the taste of English translators, as we can to the judgment of the editors of the school texts, to give us the best, that is, the best for us. The finest of Maupassant comes to us politely introduced by Mr. Henry James in “The Odd Number.” Bourget, Daudet, Pierre Loti, Mérimée, Halévy, the great Belgian poet, Maeterlinck, who belongs to French literature, Anatole France in his beautiful story, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard,” the poet Rostand--these and others we have naturalized in English. It is to France that we turn for the best criticism, and the reader who gets far enough to be interested in that branch of literature will find that many of the critics of our race have been pupils of the French critics from Sainte-Beuve to Brunetière and Hennequin. Other countries besides France, Germany, and England have produced literature which has crossed the boundaries of the nations and become the possession of the world. The Russian novel is, perhaps, the most powerful that the nineteenth century has seen, but the American reader may as well leave it until he has read a great deal of English fiction. Then he will find that Turgenieff, Tolstoi, Dostoevski are giants in a giant nation. Poland has one writer who is known to English readers, Sienkiewicz, whose “Quo Vadis” and “With Fire and Sword” are among the great novels of our age. I should recommend that admirers of “Ben Hur” read “Quo Vadis” and get a lesson in the difference between a masterpiece and a pleasant book that is very much less than a masterpiece. Readers who think there is some special virtue in American humor--and no doubt there is--ought to know at least one of the great books of Spain, “Don Quixote.” Spanish has become an important language to us who are learning about our neighbors, “the other Americans,” and are trying to wake up our lagging trade relations with them and our backward sympathies. The young man going into business will find some good chances open to him if he knows Spanish, and, what is perhaps quite as important, he will find that Spain, too, has a modern literature.