sting: "Those who knew his verses by heart (and the
number who do is large among the men of our age) meet, not without
regret, with whole strips of them spread out, drowned, as it were, in
his prose. This prose is, in 'Les Confidences,' too often but the
paraphrase of his verses, which were themselves become, toward the
last, paraphrases of his feelings." Amends are made to Lamartine on
another occasion, when, citing some recent French sonnets, he says:
"Neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Vigny wrote sonnets. The swans and the
eagles, in trying to enter this cage, would have broken their wings.
That was for us, birds of a less lofty flight and less amplitude of
wing." This is better as modesty than as criticism. Shakespeare,
Milton, Wordsworth, had wings of vaster sweep as well as of
more gorgeous plumage than these French soarers, and they enjoyed
getting into the cage of the sonnet, and sang therein some of their
strongest as well as sweetest notes.

A thorough Frenchman, M. Sainte-Beuve delights in French minds, just
as a beauty delights in her mirror, which throws back an image of
herself. His excellence as a critic is primarily owing to this joy in
things French. Through means of it he knows them through and through:
they are become transparent; and while his feelings are aglow, his
intellect looks calmly right through them, and sees on the other side
the shadows cast by the spots and opacities which frustrate more or
less the fullest illumination. Freely he exhibits these shadows.
Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV., neither Voltaire nor Beranger, is
spared, nor the French character, with its proneness to frivolity and
broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever his
individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy,
that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M.
Michelet, to Madame de Stael and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe,
to Fenelon and M. Renan, to Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau.

Have you then for M. Sainte-Beuve, some reader will be
impatient to ask, nothing but praise? Not much else. Commencing his
literary career in 1827, when only in his twenty-third year, from that
date to 1849 his writings, chiefly in the shape of literary portraits,
fill several thousand pages. Between his forty-fifth to his sixtieth
year he wrote twenty-three volumes, containing about eleven thousand
pages, on four or five hundred different authors and subjects. This is
the peri