Page:Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (tr. Shoberl, 1833).djvu/15



author of the work here submitted to the public in an English dress, though still young, has distinguished himself in almost every walk of imaginative literature: disputing the prize with the best lyric poets of the day; occupying one of the most eminent positions on the stage; and holding the very first place among the contemporary novelists of France. Of such a writer, the following particulars, brief though they be, will, it is presumed, form an acceptable Introduction to the attempt to transfuse the acknowledged master-piece of his pen into our native language.

was born on the 26th of February, 1802, at Besançon. At the age of five years he accompanied his father, then a colonel in the French army, to Italy, where this officer was afterwards appointed commandant of a province, and was engaged in suppressing the hordes of banditti which then infested that country, and, among others, the daring Fra Diavolo. Two years afterwards, young Hugo, having returned to Paris, received his first instructions from his mother, who belonged to a family of La Vendée, assisted by a royalist who was concealed in her house, and who afterwards suffered death with Mallet, and an ecclesiastic. Among the first books that he read were the works of Polybius and Tacitus. In 1811 he went with his