ches_, a book
which opens very well in a Mrs. Gaskell or Mrs. Oliphant vein, with the
introduction of a new pastor, but ends much less satisfactorily, with a
guiltless but not at all convincing love-affair between this pastor and
the wife of his chief parishioner.

[556] His wife for a time, Madame Judith Gautier, who died very
recently, wrote in a fashion not unworthy of her blood both in verse and
prose (part of her production being translations from Chinese), and was
the only lady-member of the quaint _Contre_-academie formed by E. de
Goncourt.

[557] And this shame becomes more acute when I think of one or two
individual books, such especially as M. Henry Cochin's _Manuscrit de
Monsieur C. A. L. Larsonnier_--a most pathetic and delightful story of a
mental malady which makes time and memory seem to go backward though the
victim can force himself to continue his ordinary duties, and record his
sufferings.

CONCLUSION

The remaining pages of this book should be occupied partly with a
continuation of a former chapter,[558] partly with a summary of the
whole volume, the combination, almost necessary in all cases, being
specially motived in this by the overlappings referred to above, and a
word added on the whole _History_. Not only did Victor Hugo hold, to
French literature as well as to French poetry, something very like the
position[559] occupied by Tennyson and Browning in English poetry only,
by covering every quarter of the century in whole or part with his work;
but there was, even in France, nothing like the "general post" of
disappearances and accessions which marked the period from 1820 to 1860
in English--a consequence necessarily of the later revival of French. No
one except Chateaubriand corresponded to the crowd of distinguished
writers who thus made their appearance, at the actual meeting of
eighteenth and nineteenth, with us; and though, of course, there were
exceptions, the general body of the French reinforcement did not dwindle
much till 1870 onwards.

We noted that the first great development of the nineteenth-century
novel was in the historical department, though many others made notable
fresh starts: and we said something about the second development of the
"ordinary" one which followed. It is this latter, of course, which has
supplied the main material of the last third of the present volume,
though (of course again) there have been many noteworthy and some great
examples of the hist