WANDERING JEW, The, was one of the most popular of the long series of widely and eagerly read novels that gave Eugene Sue a foremost place among the novelists of the mid dle period of the 19th century in France. It remains, with the (Mysteries of Paris)) the only one that still continues to find readers. It appeared as a serial in the newspaper Le Conststutionnel (1844-45), and created some thing of a sensation, provolcing by the abund ance of controversial matter it contained a great deal of discussion, both bitter attack and ardent defense. It returned to those lower regions of Paris Itfe and to those pictures of wretchedness and crime for which not long before the public curiosity had been excited by the (Mysteries of Pans,)) and exploited the then prevalent interest in social reforms, in the amelioration of the condition of labor and the elevation of the proletariat It was thus a vehicle for the dissemination of the generous theories and dreams of Fourier, Leroux and others. It exhibits with realistic detail the in tolerable lot of the worldng classes, especially of thee women, and elaborates a program of profit-sharing, of community living, and of other industrial improvements. It also at tacks the abuses to which certain institutions were liable, such as private asylums for the insane, convents, etc. In these respects Sue was a forerunner of Hugo and Dickens. But
these elements are submerged in a rushing tor rent of melodramatic blood and thunder. A multitude of actors struggle in a world-wide web of intrigue relentlessly spun around them by the subtle cunning of the arch villain, Rodin. The means for his iniquities Sue repre sents as furnished by the vast, secret and per fectly disciplined organization of the Jesuits, of whose society he is a devoted but not unsel fish member. So the book added to its other interests that of a violent attack on the Jesuits, at that time the objects of much suspicion and of drastic repressive measures in France, Switzerland and elsewhere. The legendary figure that gives the novel its title plays but an occasional and unimportant vile in the story, intervening once or twice in the action, but for the rest serving only as a vague symbol of the restless striving that is the lot of poor human ity. If the book is still read, in spite of so much in its matter that no longer interests us to-day, and also in spite of its inordinate length of more than 1,200 closely printed pages, it is because the story is told with real art and the pictures are drawn with vividness and color. It is accessible in English trans lation.