al of Edmond About. Possibly this was because he was
one of the pillars of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Far be it from me to
speak with the slightest disrespect of that famous periodical, to which
I have myself divers indebtednesses, and which has, in the last hundred
years or thereabouts, harboured and fostered many of the greatest
writers of France and much of her best literary work. But persons of
some age and some memory must remember a time in England when it used to
be "mentioned with _hor_" as Policeman X mentioned something or somebody
else about the same date or a little earlier. Even Matthew Arnold, in
whose comely head the bump of Veneration was not the most remarkable
protuberance, used to point to it--as something far above _us_--to be
regarded with reverence and striven towards with might and main. What
justification there might be for this in general we need not now
consider; but at any rate About has never seemed to the present
historian very much of a pillar of anything. His chief generally
accepted titles to the position in novel-writing are, I suppose, _Le Roi
des Montagnes_ and _Tolla_, each of which, and perhaps one other, we may
examine in some detail, grouping the rest (with one further exception)
more summarily. They are the better suited for our purpose in that one
is comedy if not farce, and the other a gradually threatening and at
last accomplished tragedy.

Of course it would be a very dull or a very curmudgeonly person who
should fail to see or refuse to acknowledge "fun" in the history of
Hadji or Hadgi Stavros. The mixture of sense, science, stupidity, and
unconscious humour[417] in the German narrator; the satire on the
toleration of brigandage by government in Greece (it must be confessed
that, of all the reductions to the absurd of parliamentary and
constitutional arrangements in countries unsuited for them, wherein the
last hundred years have been so prolific, Greece has provided the most
constant and reversed-sublime examples, as Russia has the most tragic);
the contrast of amiability and atrocity in the brigands themselves--all
these provide excellent opportunities, by no means always missed, for
the display of a sort of anticipated and Gallicised Gilbertianism. Nor
need the addition of stage Englishness in Mrs. Simons and her brother
and Mary Ann, of stage Americanism in Captain John Harris and his nephew
Lobster, spoil the broth.

But, to the possibly erroneous taste[418] of the p