A few months before the political revolution of July, 1830, occurred the outbreak of one of the historic artistic revolutions of the capital. Victor Hugo’s ‘Hernani,’ on which the young romantic school centred its hopes, was first performed on February 25, before an audience that took it as a matter of life and death. The performance was permitted, so tradition says, in the expectation that the play would discredit the romantic school once and for all. The principal actress, Mlle. Mars, was outraged by Hugo’s imagery, and refused point blank to call Firmin her ‘lion, superb and generous.’ A goodly _claque_, drawn from the ateliers and salons, brought the play to an overwhelming triumph, and for fifteen years the dominance of the romantic school was indisputable. This romantic school was somewhat parallel to that of Germany, and, in a general way, took the same inspiration. The literary influences, outside of the inevitable Rousseau and Chateaubriand of France itself, were chiefly Grimm’s recensions of old tales, Schiller’s plays, Schlegel’s philosophical and historical works; Goethe’s _Faust_, as well as our old friend _Werther_; Herder’s ‘Thoughts on the Philosophy of History’; Shakespeare and Dante as a matter of course; Byron and Sir Walter Scott; and any number of collections of mediæval tales and poems, foreign as well as French. This much the French and German romanticists had in common. But the movement had scarcely any political tinge, though political influences developed out of it. By a curious inversion the literary radicals were the legitimists and political conservatives, and the classicists the political revolutionists--perhaps a remnant of the Revolution, when the republicans were turning to the art and literature of Greece for ideals of ‘purity.’