f glorified advertisement. Other books, _Les
Mariages de Paris_ and _Les Mariages de Province_, almost tell their
tales, and something more,[429] in their titles.

One cannot but be sorry if this seems an unfair or shabby account of a
pleasant and popular writer, but the right and duty of historical
criticism is not to be surrendered. One of the main objects of literary
history is to separate what is quotidian from what is not. To neglect
the quotidian altogether is--whatever some people may say--to fall short
of the historian's duty; to put it in its proper place _is_ that duty.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau.]

What ought to be said and done about Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau--the
younger Sue and Soulie; the protagonists of the melodramatic and
criminal _feuilleton_ during the later middle of the century--has been
rather a problem with me. Clearly they cannot be altogether neglected.
Deep would answer to deep, Rocambole to M. Lecoq, in protesting against
such an omission of their manufacturers. I do not know, indeed, that any
English writer of distinction has done for M. le Vicomte Ponson du
Terrail what Mr. Lang did, "under the species of eternity" which verse
confers, for "(Miss Braddon and) Gaboriau." I have known those who
preferred that _other_ Viscount, "Richard O'Monroy"--who shared with
"Gyp" and Armand Silvestre the cheerful office of cheering the cheerable
during the 'eighties and later--to the more canonical possessor of the
title before him. But du Terrail was what I believe is called, in
Scottish "kirk" language, a "supply"--a person who could undertake the
duty of filling gaps--of enormous efficacy in his day. That is a claim
on this history which cannot be neglected, though the people who would
fain have Martin Tupper blotted out of the history of English poetry,
might like to drop Ponson du Terrail in that of the French novel down an
oubliette, like one of his own heroes, and _not_ give him the file
mercifully furnished to that robustious marquis. Gaboriau claims, in the
same way, even more "clamantly."

The worst of it is (to play cards on table with the strictness which is
the only virtue of this book, save perhaps an occasional absence of
ignorance) that neither of them appeals to me. I have no doubt that this
recalcitrance to the crime-novel is a _culpa_, if not a _culpa maxima_.
I suppose it was born in me. It is certainly not merely due