importance to literature as literature.
But all have their importance to literary--and especially
departmental-literary--history, in ways which it is hoped presently to
show: and there is still amusement in some. The chief, though not the
only, names that require notice here are those of Mesdames de Montolieu
and (again) de Genlis, of Ducray-Duminil, born almost as early as
Pigault-Lebrun, even earlier a novelist, and yoked with him by Victor
Hugo in respect of his novel _Lolotte et Fanfan_ in the sneer noted in
the last volume;[37] the _other_ Ducange, again as much "other" as the
other Moliere;[38] the Vicomte d'Arlincourt; and--a comparative (if,
according to some, blackish) swan among these not quite positive
geese--Paul de Kock. The eldest put in his work before the Revolution
and the youngest before Waterloo, but the most prolific time of all was
that of the first two or three decades of the century with which we are
dealing.

With these, but not of them--a producer at last of real "letters" and
more than any one else except Chateaubriand (more "intensively" perhaps
even than he was) a pioneer of Romanticism--comes Charles Nodier.

[Sidenote: Paul de Kock.]

Major Pendennis, in a passage which will probably, at least in England,
preserve the name of the author mentioned long after his own works are
even more forgotten with us than they are at present, allowed, when
disparaging novels generally, and wondering how his nephew could have
got so much money for one, that Paul de Kock "certainly made him laugh."
In his own country he had an enormous vogue, till the far greater
literary powers and the wider range of the school of 1830 put the times
out of joint for him, and even much later. He actually survived the
Terrible Year: but something like a lustrum earlier, when running over a
not small collection of cheap novels in a French country inn, I do not
remember coming across anything of his. And he had long been classed as
"not a serious person" (which, indeed, he certainly was not) by French
criticism, not merely of the most academic sort, but of all decidedly
literary kinds. People allowed him _entrain_, a word even more difficult
than _verve_ to English exactly, though "go" does in a rough sort of way
for both. They were of course not very much shocked at his indecorums,
which sometimes gave occasion for not bad jokes.[39] But if any
foreigner made any great case of him they would probably have looked, if
they d