During his long exile, which, notwithstanding his passionate love of Paris, he refused to shorten by any understanding arrived at with the emperor, he kept persecuting that usurper with printed diatribes, both in prose and in verse, which for mordant bitterness have probably never been surpassed in the literature of invective. One of these diatribes was a book entitled "The History of a Crime." To this he prefixed a kind of _imprimatur_ of his own, which may be quoted here as well exemplifying the high oracular style of expression characterized by short sentences and short paragraphs--these often of a single sentence only--that he habitually affected: This work is more than opportune. It is imperative. I publish it. V. H. Victor Hugo's egotism was so vast that it was insane if it was not sublime. To exemplify adequately this statement by extracts would ask pages of room. The four lines about to follow, from one of his longer poems, present a modest and moderate example. The poet has been supposing the impossible case that the Supreme Being should take different views, in a certain matter, from his, the poet's, own--that he should outrage his, the poet's, sense of moral propriety. Here is how, in that case, Victor Hugo would, he declares, deal with offending Deity (we translate literally the original Alexandrines, line for line, without attempting to reproduce either meter or rhyme): I would go, I would see him, and I would seize him, Amid the heavens, as one takes a wolf amid the woods, And, terrible, indignant, calm, extraordinary, I would denounce him with his own thunder. To Victor Hugo himself, the foregoing was not blasphemy; it was simply sublimity of a sort suitable to the character of the poet. There was, it is said, fully developed mental unsoundness in his father's family and in his own. Victor Hugo's own genius had, we suspect, some trace of a real, though noble, insanity in it. In 1862, appeared "Les Miserables," which must be accounted, if not the greatest, at least the most popular work of its author. This book was issued simultaneously in eight different cities and in nine different languages--a circumstance probably not paralleled in the history of literature. The fame of "Les Miserables" does not fade, and it hardly will fade. It is a book of truly prodigious elemental power. That, however, Victor Hugo's genius in producing it worked with some disturbing consciousness of a theory of literary art to be exemplified and defended, the following curious note, inserted in the midst of the text, at a point of interest in the story, may serve to show: Then the poor old man began sobbing and soliloquizing; _for it is a mistake to suppose that there is no soliloquy in nature. Powerful agitations often talk aloud._ "Les Miserables" is justly open to many strictures, both on literary grounds and on ethical; but it must be pronounced, notwithstanding, a great, and, on the whole, a noble work.