In the nineteenth century the elder Dumas (1802-70), author of _The Three Musketeers_, _Twenty Years After_, _The Count of Monte Cristo_, etc., and Victor Hugo (1802-85) inaugurated the great period of modern French literature. Hugo was an astounding literary genius, both in prose and poetry. His formidable novels, _Les Miserables_ (an epic of the poor), _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_, etc., may contain all the defects which critics find in them, but they are superb conceptions and the world still reads them as classics. “George Sand” (1804-76) is not, perhaps, read outside France today, but her position in letters is very high. I might recommend her _Consuelo_, but it is of such length that the modern reader would despair of getting through it. Her real name was the Baroness Dudevant, though she lived apart from her husband, a woman of passionate adventures. Her friend Alfred de Musset (1810-57) wrote lyric poems of the highest quality as well as literary plays and stories. With the activity of these we reach the period of the second Revolution in France, the middle of the nineteenth century and the list of distinguished names is long. While it is premature to say which, if any, of their works will rank as classics, Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863) wrote, besides dramas and novels, exquisite poetry of the Romantic school. “Stendhal” (really Henri Beyle, 1783-1842) had a very high reputation as writer of novels (_The Chartreuse of Parma_, etc.) and essays. Baudelaire (1821-67) was the second best (if not the best) French poet of the century: his book of verse _Flowers of Evil_ is certainly a classic. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote ninety powerful novels (especially the series called _The Human Comedy_, a natural history of contemporary life) and was a master of the short story. Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) was so high and conscientious an artist that he wrote only four perfect novels. Guy de Maupassant, Prosper Mérimée, the de Goncourt brothers (Jules and Edmond), T. Gautier, A. Daudet, Sainte-Beuve, Verlaine (poet), Zola, Rostand (dramatist), and the recently deceased Anatole France, the prince of modern story-writers, make up--without mentioning living writers--a group of brilliant writers who will long be remembered; and to these we ought to add scholars like Renan, Taine, Thiers, Michelet, etc., who were little less distinguished in literature. §2. GERMANY, RUSSIA AND SCANDINAVIA Apart from Luther, we have no German writer whom we would call a classic until the second half of the nineteenth century. At the time when the influence of the Renaissance might be expected to reach and stimulate it the country was desolated by a hundred years of warfare about religion. It recovered in the years before the French Revolution and immediately there appeared two poets, Goethe and Schiller, who belong to the highest company.