[31] Its second title, _ou Le Triomphe de la Religion Chretienne_, connects it still more closely than _Les Natchez_ with _Le Genie du Christianisme_, which it immediately succeeded in composition, though this took a long time. No book (it would seem in consequence) exemplifies the mania for annotation and "justification" more extensively. In vol. i. the proportion of notes to text is 112 to 270, in vol. ii. 123 to 221, and in vol. iii., including some extracts from the Pere Mambrun, 149 to 225. [32] Such as Eudore's early friendship at Rome, before the persecution under Diocletian, with Augustine, who was not born till twenty years later. [33] See note above. [34] There cannot be too much Homer in Homer; there may be too much outside Homer. [35] If one had only been Telemachus at this time! It would have been a good "Declamation" theme in the days of such things, "Should a man--for this one experience--consent to be Telemachus for the rest of his life--and after?" [36] In the original the word which I have translated "unbroken" is _eternel_, and with the adjacent _eternite_ illustrates (as do _tonnerre_ and _etonnante_ in Bossuet's famous passage on the death of "Madame") one of the minor but striking differences between French and English rhetoric. Save for some very special purpose, we should consider such repetition a jingle at best, a cacophony at worst: they think it a beauty. CHAPTER II PAUL DE KOCK, OTHER MINORS OF 1800-1830, AND NODIER [Sidenote: The fate of popular minor novelists.] The mediocre poet has had a hard fate pronounced against him of old; but the minor novelist, perhaps because he is much more likely to get some good things in his own time, has usually a harder lot still, and in more than one way, after physical or popular death. In fact it may be said that, the more popular he is in the one day, the more utterly forgotten he is likely to be in the other. Besides the obvious facts that his popularity must always have been gained by the adoption of some more or less ephemeral fashion, and that plenty of his own kind are always ready to take his place--doing, like the heir in the old story, all they can to substitute _Requiescat in Pace_ for _Resurgam_ on his hatchment--there is a more mechanical reason for his occultation. The more widely he or she has been read the more certain either has been of being "read to pieces." [Sidenote: Examples of them.]