n on the _Times_, and enjoying (I do not know with
how much justice) the repute of being the person whom Thackeray's
_Thunder and Small Beer_ has gibbeted for ever, excites amazement
nowadays at its bland but evidently sincere ignoring of the very
rudiments of criticism. I do not know that even in the most
interesting remains of George Brimley (who, had fate spared him, might
have grown into a great as he already was a good critic) we may not
trace something of the same hopeless amateurishness, the same
uncertainty and "wobbling" between the expression of unconnected and
unargued likes and dislikes concerning the matter of the piece, and
real critical considerations on its merits or demerits of scheme and
form.

Not for the first time help came to us Trojans _Graia ab urbe_.
Of the general merits of French literary criticism it is possible to
entertain a somewhat lower idea than that which (in consequence of the
very circumstances with which we are now dealing) it has been for many
years fashionable in England to hold. But between 1830 and 1860 the
French had a very strong critical school indeed--a school whose
scholars and masters showed the daemonic, or at least prophetic,
inspiration of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring
enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of
Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of Merimee, the matchless
appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical
idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest
possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of
literary theory and practice. But where they all differed quite
infinitely from the lower class of English critics, and favourably
from all but the highest in their happiest moments, was in a singular
mixture of scholarship and appreciation. Even the most Romantic of
them usually tried to compare the subject with its likes in his own
and even, to some extent, in other literatures; even the most
Classical acknowledged, to some extent, that it was his duty to
appreciate, to understand, to grasp the case of the victim before
ordering him off to execution.

In the practice of Sainte-Beuve himself, these two acknowledgments of
the duty of the critic embraced each other in the happiest union. The
want of enthusiasm which has been sometimes rather sillily charged
against him, comes in reality to no more than this--that he is too
busy in analysing, putting toget