them, however, a little tedious.

[Sidenote: Later writers and writings of the class.]

The fact, indeed, is that this kind of novel--as has been hinted
sometimes, and sometimes frankly asserted--has its own peculiar
appeals; and that these appeals, as is always the case when they are
peculiar, leave some ears deaf. There is no intention here to intimate
any superfine scorn of it. It has another and a purely literary, or at
least literary-scientific, interest as descending from the Terror Novel
of the end of the eighteenth century. It shows no sign of ceasing to
exist or to appeal to those to whom it is fitted to appeal, and who are
fitted to be appealed to by it. Towards the close of the period at which
I ceased to see French novels generally, I remember meeting with many
examples of it. There was one which, with engaging candour, called
itself _L'Hotellerie Sanglante_, and in which persons, after drinking
wine which was, as Rogue Riderhood says, "fur from a 'ealthy wine,"
retired to a rest which knew no or only a very brief and painful waking,
under the guardianship of a young person, who, to any one in any other
condition, would have seemed equally "fur" from an attractive young
person. There was another, the title of which I forget, in which the
intended victim of a plunge into a water-logged _souterrain_ connected
with the Seine made his way out and saw dreadful things in the house
above. There is really no great interval or discrepancy (except in
details of manners and morals) between these and the novels of
detective, gentleman-thief, and other impolite life which delight many
persons indubitably respectable and presumably intelligent in England
to-day.[283] To sneer at these would be ridiculous.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Murger.]

Henry Murger is not the least of the witnesses to the truth of a
remark--which I owe to one of the critics of my earlier volume--that in
England people (he was kind enough to except me) are too apt to accept
the contemporary French estimates of French contemporary literature and
the traditional French estimates of earlier authors. Murger had, I
believe, a hardly earned and too brief popularity in his own country;
and though it was a little before my time, I can believe that this
overflowed into England. But the posthumous and accepted judgments of
him altered _there_ to a sort of slighting patronage; and I remember
that when, nearly twenty years after h