High above all literary men of the time towered Victor Hugo. This man, along with Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe, was one of the greatest virtuosos of language the world has ever seen. Pity only that he had not the genius of the other three! To his time he seemed supreme. But since his death his reputation has been steadily declining. We have come to see how much of his work was only--language. He attained his emotional effects through emotional words rather than through emotional interpretation. He was incurably melodramatic and only his power of language saves a large share of his work from falling to the level of any yellow-back novel or the cheap theatre romance. He attempted to cover the whole of life--to interpret the criminal, the hero, and the child, as well as woman in every one of her moods and states. But through all the work, even the magnificent scenes of _Les Misérables_, the true human touch is somehow lacking. Everything is sacrificed to the great god Effect, to whom alone Hugo offered his most precious burnt offerings. Much of his work was in the form of short lyrics, but it is in this department that his reputation has suffered most in the half century just past. The lyric demands a naïveté which Hugo, already famous at the age of seventeen, never had. His lyric poems are always overweighted with their language, always too foreign to the spirit of the folk-poem, which is at the foundation of all lyric expression. They were, however, freely set to music, as was inevitable, and furnish a goodly share of the texts for the song literature of the time.