ture) on
architecture is inculcated. The situation, precincts, construction,
constitution of the church form the centre of such action as there is,
and supply by far the larger part of its scene. Therefore nobody has a
right to complain of a very large proportion of purely architectural
detail.

[Sidenote: The working out of the one under the other.]

But the question is whether, in the actual employment, and still more in
what we may call the administration, of this and other diluents or
obstruents of story, the artist has or has not made blunders in his art;
and it is very difficult not to answer this in the affirmative. There
were many excuses for him. The "guide-book novel" had already, and not
so very long before, been triumphantly introduced by _Corinne_. It had
been enormously popularised by Scott. The close alliance and almost
assimilation of art and history with literature was one of the supremest
articles of faith of Romanticism, and "the Gothic" was a sort of symbol,
shibboleth, and sacrament at once of Romanticism itself. But Victor
Hugo, like Falstaff, has, in this and other respects, abused his power
of pressing subjects into service almost, if not quite, damnably.
Whether out of pure wilfulness, out of mistaken theory, or out of a
mixture[98] of these and other influences, he has made the first volume
almost as little of a story as it could possibly be, while remaining a
story at all. Seventy mortal pages, pretty well packed in the standard
two-volume edition, which in all contains less than six hundred, dawdle
over the not particularly well-told business of Gringoire's interrupted
mystery, the arrival of the Flemish ambassadors, and the election of the
Pope of Unreason. The vision of Esmeralda lightens the darkness and
quickens the movement, and this brightness and liveliness continue till
she saves her unlucky dramatist from the murderous diversions of the
Cour des Miracles. But the means by which she does this--the old
privilege of matrimony--leads to nothing but a single scene, which might
have been effective, but which Hugo only leaves flat, while it has no
further importance in the story whatsoever. After it we hop or struggle
full forty pages through the public street of architecture pure and
simple.

[Sidenote: The story recovers itself latterly.]

At first sight "Coup d'oeil impartial sur l'Ancienne Magistrature" may
seem to give even more promise of November than of May. But there _is_
acti