execution are execrable scandals to the country which maintains them, he has proved beyond all humane or reasonable question; and that all murderers are not alike inexcusable is no less indisputable a proposition; but beyond these two points the most earnest and exuberant advocacy can advance nothing likely to convince any but those already converted to the principle that human life must never be taken in punishment of crime--that there are not criminals whose existence insults humanity, and cries aloud on justice for mercy's very sake to cut it off. The next year (1830) is famous forever beyond all others in the history of French literature: it was the year of _Hernani_, the date of liberation and transfiguration for the tragic stage of France. The battle which raged round the first acted play of Hugo's, and the triumph which crowned the struggles of its champions, are not these things written in too many chronicles to be for the thousandth time related here? And of its dramatic and poetic quality what praise could be uttered that must not before this have been repeated at least some myriads of times? But if there be any mortal to whom the heroic scene of the portraits, the majestic and august monologue of Charles the Fifth at the tomb of Charles the Great, the terrible beauty, the vivid pathos, the bitter sweetness of the close, convey no sense of genius and utter no message of delight, we can only say that it would simply be natural, consistent, and proper for such a critic to recognize in Shakespeare a barbarian, and a Philistine in Milton.