profession, and when twenty-three went aboard ship as a surgeon. Six years he spent in the navy, storing up impressions and experiences. He retired upon the death of his father in 1830, which made him heir to a large fortune. At this juncture Sue was a fashionable young fellow, with every temptation to become an idle man-abouttown; but there was good stuff in him, and he had a desire to exercise his talents. His turning to literature seemed accidental. At the opera one evening, a friend who edited a dramatic paper suggested to Sue a plot for a nautical tale. The latter went home and wrote it out, and the editor and his readers liked it. This furnished the necessary impulse for a series of novels, in which Sue made use of his naval life, introducing a good deal of exotic color - as Pierre Loti was to do later. 'Plick and Plock' (1831) was the first; and 'Kernock the Pirate,' 'Attar Gull,' and 'La Coucaratcha,' are other representative works of the class. They have the negligences and extravagances of the hasty writer of talent; and situations and heroes have a tendency to be Byronic. Their reception was flattering. Sue became a literary idol; not only read by the multitude, but praised by the best critics. Sainte-Beuve declared of these earlier stories that Sue had been the first French writer to venture on the sea story, and to discover the Mediterranean for literature. He was hailed as the French Cooper. A tone of worldliness and skepticism characterized Sue at this stage of his career,- -a mood to be thrown off in subsequent and more earnest fiction. A period was put to his use of the sea by a five-volume History of the French Navy,' which appeared in 1837, and would perhaps have been taken more seriously had the author's reputation as a romancer been less firmly established. After trying his hand at historical romances like 'Latréaumont' and 'Jean Cavalier,' Sue became imbued gradually with socialistic doctrine, and under this influence wrote The Mysteries of Paris' (1842) and The Wandering Jew' (1844-5). There is no question about the boldness and brilliancy of conception in these books, nor of their earnestness of intention and varied attraction. The former is not so much a close-knit novel as a great number of loosely connected episodes and pictures. Sue is eminently episodical; his canvas is a vast one, and he crowds it with figures. Yet such is his gift that this social kaleidoscope leaves distinct impressions; his moving scenes enthrall the beholder. He is facile rather than deep; but his representation of social misery and depravity in France did good in arousing people's minds to the facts, as did Dickens's representation of similar evils in England. In 'The Wandering Jew,' the central idea of the wretch doomed to wander for centuries from land to land, leaving woe in his |