ugh he might have heard of
the former, is very unlikely to have known the latter, which comes
nearer to his arrangement.

[282] The contact _here_ with the _Peau de Chagrin_ need hardly be dwelt
upon.

[283] A little more on this subject may be given later to Gaboriau and
Ponson du Terrail.

[284] Reprinted in _Essays on French Novelists_.

[285] A somewhat fuller discussion of this heretical _bona patria_ of
literature may be found in the original Essay. I had at one time thought
of reprinting it--in text or appendix--here. But perhaps it would be
superfluous. I ought, however, to add that I have seen, in French
writers, later again than those referred to in the text, some touches of
revived interest in Murger.

[286] Translated at length in the Essay.

[287] I have always been a little curious to know whether that
remarkable periodical, Cope's _Tobacco Plant_, which gave us not a
little of James Thomson the Second's work, was really, as it might have
been, conceived as a follower of _Le Castor_.

[288] Murger knows this and allows it.

[289] Who, moreover, _did_ work, and that pretty hard, in his
Secretaryship, and by no means disdained pay for it--purely "patriotic"
as (in his view) it was.

[290] _Jerome Paturot, with Considerations on Novels in General_,
originally appeared in _Fraser_ for September 1843. Not reprinted in the
author's lifetime, or till the supplementary collection of 1885-86. May
be found, with some remarks by the present writer, in the "Oxford"
Thackeray, vol. vi. pp. 318-342.

[291] It is fair to say that some of the best Alexandriana were still to
come.

[292] The retort courteous, if not even the countercheck quarrelsome,
"Then why do you notice it?" is pretty obvious. Taking it as the former,
it may be answered, "The political novel, if not the most strictly
legitimate species of the kind, is numerous and not unimportant. It may
therefore be allowed a specimen, and an examination of that specimen."

[293] Malvina, as one might expect, is by this time an "Anti-" of the
most stalwart kind; though in the Saint-Simonian salad days, she had (as
naturally) taken the other side.

[294] Probably more people know _La Croix de Berny_, which he wrote with
Sandeau, Gautier, and Madame de Girardin, than anything exclusively his.

[295] Others may have been more fortunate. In any case, what follows,
whatever its intrinsic merit, is typical of a great mass of similar
French fiction, and th