The immense popularity of Victor Hugo was not so much due to the love of poetry in Frenchmen as to their gratitude for his fidelity to the popular cause, and admiration for his steady resistance to Napoleon III. Had he remained a royalist to the last, his fame would have been of a quieter kind. The French have a way of taking up a man and making political capital out of him, increasing his reputation as much as possible for that purpose. Hugo’s name and his portraits were familiar to multitudes who knew nothing of his poetry. This deprives the observer of what might have been otherwise a good opportunity for appreciating the degree of interest that the French take in poetry on its own account, but even without political popularity there remained Hugo’s celebrity as a novelist. The case is a very complex one. Great vigour in old age is deeply respected and admired in France, and Hugo was a very fine old man. I am told that the generation now passing away took a much keener interest in literature than the present. As for poor Lamartine, his fame has been for a while completely eclipsed, but there are now some signs of a revival. Alfred de Musset is read by all French people of a literary turn, especially by young men, who delight in him as young Englishmen delighted in Byron before Tennyson became the fashion. The minor French poets of the present day are numerous, and the tendency amongst them is to a great perfection of technical finish, which is praiseworthy as a proof of labour and self-discipline. But it is the novelists and the playwrights who have the substantial success. They earn ten times more money than that hard-working man of genius, Balzac, would even have dreamed of as a possibility in his then wretched profession. There is a young school of philosophers, very sane and very sage, who are trying earnestly to win some nearer approach to the hidden truths of life and the universe, but they only reach the small intellectual class. Renan has literary qualities of the highest order, but like the majority of first-rate men of letters he is disgusted with the sight of practical politics, and more inclined to make the combatants a subject for sarcasm than to help them out of the sloughs they fall into, either on one side or the other. Practical influence with the pen appears now to belong, in France, almost exclusively, to journalists, and they are constantly under the temptation to get up sensational excitements, to make a fuss, and convert every little crisis into a great one. As English journalism is anonymous, the writers cannot aspire to make themselves personally conspicuous, and are somewhat quieter. That which, in England, now answers in some degree to French journalism is review-writing with signed articles. [Sidenote: The Dread of War in England.]