The Has Been is blotted out; the To Be is as the shadow of a far land in a mighty and perturbed sea.* * The reader will remember that these remarks were written long before the last French Revolution, and when the dynasty of Louis Philippe was generally considered most secure.
Maltravers, who for several years had not examined the progress of modern literature, looked with mingled feelings of surprise, distaste, and occasional and most reluctant admiration, on the various works which the successors of Voltaire and Rousseau have produced, and are pleased to call the offspring of Truth united to Romance.
Profoundly versed in the mechanism and elements of those masterpieces of Germany and England, from which the French have borrowed so largely while pretending to be original, Maltravers was shocked to see the monsters which these Frankensteins had created from the relics and the offal of the holiest sepulchres.

The head of a giant on the limbs of a dwarf, incongruous members jumbled together, parts fair and beautiful,--the whole a hideous distortion! "It may be possible," said he to De Montaigne, "that these works are admired and extolled; but how they can be vindicated by the examples of Shakspeare and Goethe, or even of Byron, who redeemed poor and melodramatic conceptions with a manly vigour of execution, an energy and completeness of purpose, that Dryden himself never surpassed, is to me utterly inconceivable." "I allow that there is a strange mixture of fustian and maudlin in all these things," answered De Montaigne; "but they are but the windfalls of trees that may bear rich fruit in due season; meanwhile, any new school is better than eternal imitations of the old.

As for critical vindications of the works themselves, the age that produces the phenomena is never the age to classify and analyze them.

We have had a deluge, and now new creatures spring from the new soil." "An excellent simile: they come forth from slime and mud,--fetid and crawling, unformed and monstrous.

I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo.