such
masters in the guise of readers as desire to hear about him. For he is
one more of those--I do not think I have had or shall have to confess to
many--whom I have found it almost impossible to read. I acknowledge,
indeed, that though at the first reading (I do not know how many years
ago) of his most famous work, _Le Juif Errant_, I found no merit in it
at all, at a second, though I do not think that even then I quite got
through it, I had to allow a certain grandiosity. _The Mysteries of
Paris_ has always defeated me, and I am now content to enjoy Thackeray's
very admirable _precis_ of part of it. Out of pure goodness and sheer
equity I endeavoured, for the present volume, to make myself acquainted
with one of his later books--the immense _Sept Peches Capitaux_, which
is said to be a Fourierist novel, and explains how the vices may be
induced, in a sort of Mandeville-made-amiable fashion, to promote the
good of society. I found it what Mrs. Browning has made somebody
pronounce Fourier himself in _Aurora Leigh_, "Naught!"[276] except that
I left them at the end actually committing an Eighth deadly sin by
drinking _iced_ Constantia![277] Sue, who had been an army surgeon and
had served during the Napoleonic war, both on land and at sea, wrote,
before he took to his great melodramas, some rather extravagant naval
novels, which are simply rubbish compared with Marryat, but in
themselves not quite, I think, so difficult to read as his better known
work. I remember one in particular, but I am not certain whether it was
_La Coucaratcha_ or _La Vigie de Koatven_. They are both very nice
titles, and I am so much afraid of disillusionment that I have thought
it better to look neither up for this occasion.[278]

[Sidenote: Melodramatic fiction generally.]

The fact is, as it seems to me, that the proper place for melodrama is
not the study but the stage. I fear I have uttered some heresies about
the theatre in this book, and I should not be sorry if I never passed
through its doors again. If I must, I had rather the entertainment were
melodrama than anything else. The better the play is as literature, the
more I wish that I might be left to read it in comfort and see it acted
with my mind's eye only. But I can rejoice in the valiant curate when
(with the aid of an avalanche, if I remember rightly) he triumphs over
the wicked baronet, who is treading on the fingers of the heroine as
she hangs over the precipice. I can laugh a