Text: Edgar Allan Poe (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), November 29, 1845, vol. 2, no. 21, p. ???, col. ?

[page 321, column 2, continued:]

Wiley & Putman's Foreign Library. Nos. 3 and 4. The Rhine. By Victor Hugo.

This is a re-print of the best of two British translations — and is the first American edition. A prefatory discourse on European affairs, is very properly omitted.

The style of this “Tour” is particularly French — there is no other word for the idea. We find a great deal of point, vivacity, wit, humor, archness, novelty — the whole pervaded and “toned down” by a delicious simplicity. — It is not as a tourist, however, or as a sketcher, that Victor Hugo is most remarkable. His essays in this way are scarcely better than those of fifty other Frenchmen — but as a builder of brief fictions he is unequalled among his countrymen — very far surpassing, we think, Eugène Sue. His “Notre Dâme” is a work of high genius controlled by consummate art.