Portraits litteraires_, _Portraits contemporains_, and _Portraits de
Femmes_. The names included, which with few exceptions are those of
French writers, belong to different epochs, different schools, and
different departments of literature. Many are famous; some are obscure;
not a few, which had before been overlooked or overshadowed, owe the
recognition they have since received to their admission into a gallery
where the places have been assigned and the lights distributed by no
partial or incompetent umpire.

In the case of any kind of literature, but especially in that of
criticism, it is interesting to have an author's own ideas of his office
and art. The motto of the Edinburgh Review--"_Judex damnatur cum nocens
absolvitur_"--was a very good indication of the spirit of its founders,
whose legal habits and aspirations naturally suggested the spectacle of
a court, in which the critic as judge was to sit upon the bench, and the
author as prisoner was to stand at the bar. Had Jeffries, instead of
Jeffrey, presided over the assizes, they could not have been gayer or
bloodier. It is interesting to remember that among the criminals
sentenced without reprieve were the greatest poet and the most original
thinker of the time. A journal which has earned something of the
prestige that attached to the youthful Edinburgh takes a not very
different view of its own functions. "An author may wince under
criticism," say the writers of the Saturday Review; "but is the master
to leave off flogging because the pupil roars?" Here, too, the notion of
the relative position of author and critic is perfectly natural. Young
gentlemen, with a lively recollection of their own construings and
birchings, are only too happy in the opportunity of sitting with bent
brows and uplifted rod, watching for a false quantity or similar
peccadillo, which may justify a withering rebuke or a vigorous
flagellation. If we add, that these writers exhibit that accuracy of
statement which usually accompanies the assumption of infallibility, and
that their English is of that prim and painful kind, common to
pedagogues, which betrays a constant fear of being caught tripping while
engaged in correcting others, the comparison--to cite once more M. de
Pontmartin--"will appear only the more exact." We forbear to descend to
a far lower class, judges who know nothing of law, masters who have
never been scholars, truly "incomplete artists" who cannot "forget or
bury" thei