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. But oh, that a nation which has known a
Corneille should ever spawn forth a -----! And with these rickety and
drivelling abortions--all having followers and adulators--your Public can
still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the day when