HUGLI 



2865 



HUGO 



compared with this one celebrated book. Mr. 

 Hughes was only ten years of age when he was 

 sent to the famous school at Rugby, and Tom 

 Brown is a product of his personal impres- 

 sions. 



He enjoyed a long public career, as advanced 

 Liberal in Parliament and as one of the 

 founders of the Christian Socialists, and he 

 devoted a great deal of time to the social uplift 

 of the working class, particularly through the 

 system of cooperation. Vacation Rambles is 

 a collection of sketches which he wrote to 

 defray his expenses on little Continental trips, 

 and these sketches served as his apprenticeship 

 in writing. The Scouring of the White Horse is 

 a lively account of one of his vacation trips. 

 He continued his favorite hero's career in Tom 

 Brown at Oxford, which was first published as 

 a serial in Macmillan's Magazine. His other 

 works include The Memoir of a Brother, The 

 Manliness of Christ, Alfred the Great, and a 

 sketch of Rugby, Tennessee. 



HUGLI, or HOOGLY, hoo'gli, a river of 

 Bengal, India, the principal channel through 

 which the Ganges reaches the sea, formed by 

 the union of three rivers of the Nadiya dis- 

 trict. Including its estuary, the Hugli is about 

 160 miles long. It is shallow above Calcutta 

 and empties into the Bay of Bengal. Com- 

 mercially this is the most important channel of 

 the Ganges, for it is the one most easily navi- 

 gated. Large boats can ascend to Calcutta, 

 eighty-six miles from the sea. See GANGES. 



HU'GO, VICTOR MARIE (1802-1885), a French 

 poet, novelist and dramatist, one of the com- 

 manding figures in the world's literature. As 

 a writer of fiction the world knows him best 

 as the author of that great epic of the human 

 soul, Les Miserables. Those who look for per- 

 fection of construction, proportion and sym- 

 metry in a novel will find none of these 

 qualities in Les Miserables. This story of Jean 

 Valjean, a man raised from the depths of sin 

 and degradation, purified and transfigured by 

 suffering, is a masterpiece of emotional and 

 descriptive writing, a lyric-epic in prose. When 

 it was published, in 1862, it appeared on the 

 same day in ten different languages, and it 

 still is widely read. The book is described 

 under its title in these volumes. 



Victor Hugo was born at BesanQon, on Feb- 

 ruary 26, 1802, the son of a distinguished gen- 

 eral who served in the army of Napoleon 

 Bonaparte. The boy was educated in Madrid 

 and in Paris, and he grew up passionately 

 devoted to the principles of the royalists and 

 180 



in the Roman Catholic faith. His poetic 

 genius was revealed in his early odes and bal- 

 lads, published before he was twenty-five, and 

 when, in 1830, his tragedy Hernani was pro- 

 duced in Paris, 

 he was hailed as 

 the great leader 

 of the Romanti- 

 cists (see Ro- 

 MANTICISM). 

 This was fol- 

 lowed by several 

 other plays, nota- 

 bly Marion De- 

 lorme, The King 

 Amuses Himself, 

 Lucrece Borgia, 

 Ruy Bias and Les VICTOR HUGO 



#?/rmv7?>pQ h 11 t The greatest French writer 

 tiur graves, but Qf hig * entury T he sublimity 



with the presen- and splendor of his imagina- 

 ,. ,. ,, i , tion and his mastery of lan- 



tation Ot the lat- guage rank him with Shake- 

 ter, in 1843, Hugo speare, M ilton and Dante, 

 became convinced that his conceptions of the 

 drama were too lofty for the limitations of the 

 state, and he abandoned his dramatic career. 



In 1829 he gave to the press his first impor- 

 tant work in prose fiction, The Last Day of 

 a Man Condemned to Death, a fervent protest 

 against capital punishment. Notre-Dame de 

 Paris, a great historic and romantic poem in 

 the form of a prose narrative, with its wonder- 

 ful picture of Paris in the time of Louis XI, 

 followed in 1831. Three years later appeared 

 the novel Claude Gueux, another eloquent plea 

 against capital punishment, and then came sev- 

 eral volumes of poems, revealing the author's 

 growing sympathy for democratic ideals. In 

 the year 1841 he was elected to the French 

 Academy. 



The decade between 1843 and 1853 was a 

 period of political activity for Hugo. In 1845 

 he was made a peer of France by Louis 

 Philippe, and the following year delivered his 

 first speech in the House of Lords, or upper 

 chamber of the French Parliament. On the 

 outbreak of the Revolution of 1848 he gave 

 his support to Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon 

 III). When the latter ceased to favor his 

 advancement he became one of the leaders of 

 the democratic faction, and after Napoleon's 

 seizure of power, in 1851, Hugo was one of 

 those who continued the struggle against that 

 tyrant. Forced to flee from France, he went 

 to Brussels and then to the island of Jersey, 

 in the English Channel. From this retreat he 

 was expelled with other French exiles by the 



