of all grades of human-kind, not of the highest only. All races must perpetuate and develop themselves by education, because each race represents a special department of humman nature, and, to obtain its full evolution and perfect development, not one of its elements, or its special capacity, or its individual energy, can be disregarded with impunity. It is not sufficient, in his eyes, to multiply rich merchants or clever manufacturers, to build numberless miles of railroads, to construct telegraphs, telephones, electric candles, and to secure the endless paraphernalia of luxury: art, literature, poetry, mental and scientific speculations, appear to him more necessary to civilization. Fraternity, far from being an empty word, is the embodiment of a real law, and moral progress precedes and does not follow material progress. "Chimeras," the wise will say, "mere chi meras. 'Bah! Le Poete, il est dans les nuages' -the poet, he is in the clouds. Look upon America; there, as the Caucasian, not to say the Saxon, advances, the Indian race is gradually retreating toward complete extinction."

This cannot be denied, and we can reckon upon the eventual disappearance of the few hundred thousand Indians who formerly peopled the vast solitudes of North America. But, on the other hand, can any one, unless he has lost the last vestige of common sense, admit for one moment, from the phenomenon of Indian decay, a world-wide generalization that inferior races succumb before the higher, according to the doctrines of Darwin? Consider other races vastly more numerous and tenacious, and so extensively prolific, in spite of their supposed inferiority. Turn to China or to India. Count their inhabitants. Regard, also, the Irish Celts, so despised by Saxons and Germans, the CeltLatins of France and of Southern Europe, the Slavonians, who spread all over the east and the north, as well as the Spanish halfbreeds extending from Mexico to Cape Horn. Can any one really believe in their coming disappearance before an advancing superior race? If the survival of the fittest, as understood by many, is a law of human

life, we should expect a Chinafication of the world. Such must be the conclusion after a serious consideration of the facts.

But, after all, is not Victor Hugo of the same school as Darwinistic philosophers? Does he not attribute to Latins, and, first of all, to the French, this same superiority, which he refuses to recognize among Germans or Saxons? No one who reads his works carefully will come to such a conclusion. Victor Hugo had too broad a mind to adopt so narrow views of human destiny. Certainly, he loved France more than any other country in the world, and frequently dwells with some complacency upon her leading role in the advancement of modern civilization. But Germans, as all men know, contemplate very generally the future Germanization of the world; and Englishmen, gazing on their vast Empire, draw similar inferences for their own tongue, as if their language were already spoken from one pole to the other-in Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope to Alexandria, throughout the Soudan and Congo; in Asia, from India through Afghanistan to Constantinople; and in America, from the extreme north to Cape Horn. Victor Hugo never indulged such extravagant dreams, or thought of Frenchifying our planet. "Will there be several languages in the thirtieth century of our era? and if but one language, which one?"he neither proposes nor answers such a question. There is an English, a German, and a French civilization, and their concurrence is to produce a result greater than its elementary components: United-Civilizations and United-States, nothing more.

Whenever Victor Hugo speaks of America, he sees her as a great example set to Europe. In an address to the Parisian delegates who were sent to the Philadelphia exhibition, he said: "The future of the world is clear from this moment, and you are to outline this superb reality, which another century will fulfil, the embrace of the United States of America by the United States of Europe."

The obstacles which oppose his hope, the Americanization of Europe, do not escape

his eyes: "In the middle of the continent, Germany stands armed to the teeth, an unceasing threat to peace, the last effort of the mediæval spirit. Everything that was done (1870) must be undone. Between the great future and us there is a fatal obstacle. Peace is perceptible only after a collision and an inexorable struggle. Alas! Whatever the future may promise, the present has no realization of peace."

If we compare, for instance, Europe in the eleventh century with America in the nineteenth, and realize what an immense distance extends between them, and how easily that distance has been traversed and overcome, we may clearly understand that none of the expectations of Victor Hugo are impossible, or even to be relegated to a distant future. Undoubtedly, European nations are widely separated by differences of race and religion. But America, with so many different sects-Catholics, and Protestants of all denominations, with such various nationalities, Saxons, Germans, Celts, Latins, and even negroes multiplying in the Southern States to an almost alarming extent-America, I say, shows such difficulties not to be insurmountable. The barrier raised by diversity of language, which does not exist on this side of the Atlantic, is becoming every moment less formidable. The time is near when the culture of modern languages, taking possession of all the ground lost by the Greek and the Latin, will produce a mutual interpretation of ideas and sentiments, and demolish those walls of prejudice so carefully maintained by conceit and narrow mindedness. Why, then, shall we draw a line between the new and the old world, and say: "Freedom and justice on this side, despotism and social tyranny on the other side?" Is this really a mere question of longitude?

These are the opinions of Victor Hugo. They have nothing new-nil novi sub sole, except in the scientific fields. Only he sang these grand old themes with a voice so sonorous, so powerful, so sublime, that they have resounded all over the earth, and deeply impressed and modified men's hearts and

minds in France and other civilized courtries.

Victor Hugo, though considered by most men in all countries as the greatest of French poets, had and still has many adversaries. First among them, we may see the Bonapart ist admirers of that Napoleon branded by Hugo as Napoleon le Petit, or Cartoucheke Grand. These men were supporters of a throne shown by him to be founded on perjury, murder, and burglary. Against Bonapartism Victor Hugo has written two satires, the most forcible, perhaps, that exist in any language. When the first, a prose pamphlet, entitled Napoleon le Petit, was issued, the Bonapartists affected to laugh. After the Coup d'Etat, a few weeks before Napoleon III. assumed the title of Emperor, one could read in one of the journals that favored the Prince-President: "M. Victor Hugo has just issued in Brussels a pamphlet with the title Napoleon le Petit, which contains the most severe animadversion against the head of the government." An officer of rank brought to Saint Cloud the satirical issue. Louis Napoleon took it in his hands, looked at it a moment with a smile of contempt on his lips, and then, pointing to the pamphlet, he said to the persons around him :

"Look here, gentlemen, this is Napoleon le Petit, described by Victor Hugo le Grand."

Was Louis Napoleon a prophet inferior in any respect to the biblical ass of Balaam?

The would-be laugh stopped short, for, soon after, the Châtiments made their ap pearance, and never did such a whip fall on the shoulders of a criminal. In fact, this book, printed on candle-paper-not one publisher in all Europe could be found to print the terrible book-secretly introduced into France, secretly read, for fear of prison or deportation--this book, I say, prepared the fall of the Empire, by indoctrinating the rising generation with the noble cause of liberty. After the Franco-German war and the horrors of the Commune, there would have been perhaps an attempt at Napoleonic restoration, but for that powerful book. Through Hugo's influence, such an attempt had become utterly hopeless, and remained untried.

Many books, before and after the definite fall of Bonapartism, have been written with the purpose of impairing the force of the Châtiments, all in vain. The Memoirs of M. de Maupas, recently published, have been the last and strongest effort made by Bonapartists to vindicate an event that disgraced France, between the years 1851 and 1870. Poor M. de Maupas! why, in fifty years twenty, ten, five perhaps-nobody will read his Memoirs, and thus not a line of that plea of his shall linger in history, in which truth alone is allowed by time to remain. The book will be forgotten-not, alas! the name of its author, for that name has been engraven in the Châtiments by a hand that engraves for all time:

"Trois amis l'entouraient, ils étaient à l'Elysée Morny, Maupas le grec, Saint-Arnaud le chacal." and forever will men say, Maupas le grec, as they will say Napoleon le Petit or Cartouche le Grand.

To the adversaries of Victor Hugo, known as Bonapartists, we shall add a class known as Les Ventrus. They worshiped the empire, inasmuch as this government was to them a golden calf, and allowed them to fill their purse with other people's money. These latter did not go so far, perhaps, as to hate Victor Hugo, but could not help refusing their admiration to a man who address ed them in those lines:

“Le bon, le sûr, le vrai, c'est l'or dans notre caisse. L'homme est extravagant qui, lorsque tout s'affaisse,

Proteste seul debout dans une nation
Et porte à bras tendu son indignation.
Que diable! il faut pourtant vivre de l'air des rues,
Et ne pas s'entêter aux choses disparues.
Quoi tout meurt ici-bas, l'aigle comme le ver
Le Charancon périt sous la neige l'hiver,
Quoi mon coude est troué, quoi ! je perce mes
chausses,

Quoi! mon feutre était neuf et s'est usé depuis,
Et la Vérité, mâtre, aurait, dans son vieux puits
Cette prétention rare d'être éternelle.

De ne pas se mouiller quand il pleut, d'être belle
A jamais, d'être reine, en n'ayant pas le sou;
Et de ne pas mourir quand on lui tord le cou!
Allons donc Citoyens, c'est au fait qu'il faut

croire !"

The "Ventrus" are followed by the "Philistines," and by all those who remain infat

uated with an inordinate, although in some respects legitimate, admiration of that literature, called by them rather pompously "The Literature of the Grand Siècle." Most of these men are fifty years old or more. No hatred in them for Victor Hugo; not even the refusal of some esteem. They are ig norant of his poetry or prose. While they were school-boys they heard that Hugo might be permitted to occupy a place of a certain distinction between Lamartine and Alfred de Musset. All their poetical ideas

are derived from Boileau and M. de la Harpe, that strange critic who thought it necessary to justify Racine for the use of the word chien (dog) in his tragedy of Athalie. Could such people possibly understand a Hugo bold enough to write without blank (en toutes lettres) the real word of Cambronne on the Waterloo battle-field, and many other things no less shocking to their refined taste ?

But we must go on; thanks to God, Bonapartists or bourgeois are but a small minority in France, and Victor Hugo is to nearly all the uncontested king of our literature.

"Victor Hugo was born with the century," writes M. Henri Rochefort, "and when he disappears we shall feel as if he had taken the whole century with him."

Are there any writers, in fact, bold enough to divide among themselves the empire of that other Alexander, who subdued, himself alone, the whole literary world in writing dramas, romances, and unlimited verse, which extends from the Orientales to the Légende des Siècles? Will any others renew that prodigious labor by which he transformed the French language to such an extent as to make almost unreadable today writers who were his seniors by a few years only, such as Chateaubriand, Casimir Delavigne, or Alfred de Vigny? He marked with his own stamp and impressed with his genius three successive generations of writers, several of whom submitted to him as by force, unable, in spite of their will, to escape this irresistible domination. All, or nearly all, French writers of the nineteenth century, whether they know it or not, whether thou

by the hands of Victor Hugo.

The variety of his political formulas is almost incredible, and no chord has been missing in his lyre. Grand and sublime, he strikes all imaginations; sweet and tender, he sings of children and roses; then, suddenly, he is full of burning indignation-he terrifies, he forces admiration and awe. There was never a more complete poet; to France he is a real Shakspere.

Among his characteristics we must dwell upon his marvelous memory, either of facts or of conceptions. Nothing written on the bronze tablets of his memory has ever been erased. Hence the marvelous variety of his metaphors, never diminishing, always increasing in number. His eyes do not perceive objects in the ordinary manner; there is in them an extraordinary power of magnifying. "Hence," says so appropriately M. Emile Montégut, "his predilections for immense, overpoweringly gigantic objects and for frightful and sublime spectacles. He prefers to all other themes war, storms, death, early civilizations, with their Babels and monstrous orgies, nature in prehistoric times, with her colossal prodigies and forests of gigantic ferns. What powerful imitations of oceans howling under tempests! How graphically glaring to our eyes does he depict the conflagration of cities, how crushing the trampling of steeds in bloody battles!" These are his favorite subjects of description; here is the dominion over which he rules, with no fear of rivalry. In other fields, he may have competitors; here Victor Hugo is peerless.

Never do ideas occur to his mind in abstract forms; to him they are always embodied in metaphors. After he has long gazed upon things, his imagination becomes inflamed, as Sybilla's on the tripod; apocalyptic visions, rising from objects all around, and from his own fancy, swarm before his mental sight with a stormlike fury, amidst a dazzling light, in all the colors of the rainbow; while

lates, describes, engraves everything he sees in the fathomless abyss. Most other poets or writers, after the over-excitement of composition, have to suppress and concentrate ; he does neither. He makes only a few corrections of detail, about which he is known to be very peculiar. Thus is explained the abundance, the multiplicity of his points of view, and also his repetition. First he perceives his object under a certain light, describes it, but is not satisfied; after that first image, a second, a third, and so on, succeed in turn, until he finally comes to the supreme expression, to the full light, to what he terms somewhere "the embrace of Mind and Truth." So, with him things become gradually comprehended, on all their sides successively, more and yet more clearly, until we come to the perfect vision. His preliminary views, with which many a distinguished poet would be satisfied, are seldom to be suppressed, as they lead on to a more complete understanding. On ascending the mountain, the reader passes from enchantment to enchantment, until he is at last transported on the summit, face to face with the sun in his radiant splendor.

poetry? them.

Are there no spots on that sun of French There are certainly, and many of But why should I care to point them out? Every one will be inclined to discover them, and even to exaggerate their number and size. Read his works, his novels, plays, and verse-the latter especially. His poetical diamonds, in my opinion, are the Chât iments, and, superior to all, the Légendes des Siècles, a series of wonderful epic poems, a mirror of twenty centuries of past civilizations, and an idealized World's History. Read, allow me to repeat, read and meditate upon the great French poet. With the object of reading Victor Hugo's poetry, it is worth the trouble to study the French language, as it is worth the study of English to read Shakspere.

F. V. Paget.

We sat on a brown, sunlit slope in the high hills that looked down on Pope Valley, and talked of California and its horticultural future. One of our number had grown up with the prosperous colonies of the Southern counties—each one of them worthy a separate magazine article; another knew the old camps of the Sierras "like a book," and held that the future would prove the most valuable land of the State to lie in that region; a third had helped to reclaim some of the tule islands, and had fought spring floods of the Sacramento and San Joaquin. The journalist of our party had ridden on horseback over the State, questioning all men, and saying all that his conscience allowed in praise of each and every district he visited, being gifted by nature with that faculty of enjoying everything, which, while men envy, they also criticise without mercy.

Keen and glad, the wind blew from rocky ridges and across bits of vine-planted clearings, while we talked of the brave work that men were doing in these Pacific States. "If we could look forth, this moment," said one, "and have a birdseye view of California, how much pioneer work, and how much, also, that seldom comes to communities till the third generation, we should see. The interior towns are growing with great rapidity, the State is receiving accessions of the better sort of settlers, the large tracts of land are being subdivided, there is no suffering and but little poverty. The season that we call a 'hard' one will nevertheless distribute nearly twice as much money per capita as is received by the inhabitants of one of the dull and slow Atlantic States."

"Always the hit at the East!" said another; "You are California born and bred. It is worse than absurd for any one who has not known the charm of life in the New England and Middle States under proper auspices to pronounce that life dull and slow. The Eastern man who comes to California may

do a good thing for himself financially, though even that is not certain, but he will assuredly miss much in society and climate."

"Climate-oh-h! New York's soggy heat that untwists the very tendons, and melts the marrow in one's bones-why, certainly, how one must miss it!"

"Let us

"Peace," said the journalist. saddle our horses, and try a gallop over this high table land. Leave climatics, for that way madness lies. I once spent a year of time and all my spare change vainly trying to convince my New York friends that fruits of reasonable quality grew in California, that drinkable wine was really made here. To us, it is strange that so many Eastern people prefer Hudson Valley Concords and Clintons to Solano County Muscats and Flame Tokays; to them it is passing strange that dust, and wind, and rainless summer, and gold-brown fields, can be found endurable by any mortal. Yet we know with how strong a charm California calls back her wandering children, and so we can afford to smile, and go on planting our orchards, vineyards, and gardens. When we have made it as beautiful as the plains of Lombardy or the valleys of Southern France, these pioneer days will seem but the rude beginnings that they are in reality. 'Tis only a small corner of the world as yet, this California, and only when one speaks of the realm of the Pacific Coast does the thought of its imperial possibilities over-master the imagination. The world will say hard things about us, or worse still, will ignore us in calm preoccupation, until we know beyond dispute that we have the permanence of varied industries, and the capacity to work out our own civilization.

"There's room and to spare for a discussion,” said another, "but let us saddle the mustangs, and be off."

We ran down the rocky slope to the pasture-field, drove the manada of horses and colts to the corral, selected our mounts, and