As regards one formerly almost famous and still well-known novelist, Eugene Sue, I am afraid I shall be an unprofitable servant to such masters in the guise of readers as desire to hear about him. For he is one more of those--I do not think I have had or shall have to confess to many--whom I have found it almost impossible to read. I acknowledge, indeed, that though at the first reading (I do not know how many years ago) of his most famous work, _Le Juif Errant_, I found no merit in it at all, at a second, though I do not think that even then I quite got through it, I had to allow a certain grandiosity. _The Mysteries of Paris_ has always defeated me, and I am now content to enjoy Thackeray's very admirable _precis_ of part of it. Out of pure goodness and sheer equity I endeavoured, for the present volume, to make myself acquainted with one of his later books--the immense _Sept Peches Capitaux_, which is said to be a Fourierist novel, and explains how the vices may be induced, in a sort of Mandeville-made-amiable fashion, to promote the good of society. I found it what Mrs. Browning has made somebody pronounce Fourier himself in _Aurora Leigh_, "Naught!"[276] except that I left them at the end actually committing an Eighth deadly sin by drinking _iced_ Constantia![277] Sue, who had been an army surgeon and had served during the Napoleonic war, both on land and at sea, wrote, before he took to his great melodramas, some rather extravagant naval novels, which are simply rubbish compared with Marryat, but in themselves not quite, I think, so difficult to read as his better known work. I remember one in particular, but I am not certain whether it was _La Coucaratcha_ or _La Vigie de Koatven_. They are both very nice titles, and I am so much afraid of disillusionment that I have thought it better to look neither up for this occasion.[278] [Sidenote: Melodramatic fiction generally.]