paralleling from private sources the collections
which are (quite excusably) added as advertisements from published
criticisms to later editions of a book. Intrinsically the things, no
doubt, have interest. Chateaubriand, whose _Rene_ is effusively praised
in the novel, opens with an equally effusive but rather brief letter of
thanks, not destitute of the apparent artificiality which, for all his
genius, distinguished that "noble _Why_count," and perhaps, for all its
"butter," partly responsible for the _aigre-doux_ fashion in which the
prais_ee_ subsequently treated the prais_er_. Michelet, Villemain, and
Nisard are equally favourable, and perhaps a little more sincere, though
Nisard (of course) is in trouble about Sainte-Beuve's divagations from
the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Brizeux applauds
in prose _and_ verse. Madame de Castries (Balzac's "Duchesse de
Langeais"), afterwards an intimate personal friend of the critic's,
acknowledges, in an anonymous letter, her "profound emotion." Lesser,
but not least, people like Magnin join. Eugenie de Guerin bribes her
future eulogist. Madame Desbordes-Valmore, _the_ French poetess of the
day, is enthusiastic as to the book: and George Sand herself writes a
good half-dozen small-printed and exuberant pages, in which the only
(but repeated) complaint is that Sainte-Beuve actually makes his hero
find comfort in Christianity. Neither Lamartine (as we might have
expected) nor Lamennais (whose disciple Sainte-Beuve had tried to be)
liked it; but Lacordaire did not disapprove.

[Sidenote: Itself.]

Before saying anything more about it, let us give a brief argument of
it--a thing which it requires more (for reasons to be given later) than
most books, whether "precisely" novels or not. It is the autobiographic
history of a certain "Amaury" (whose surname, I think, we never hear),
addressed as a caution to a younger friend, no name of whom we ever hear
at all. The friend is too much addicted to the pleasures of sense, and
Amaury gives him his own experience of a similar tendency. Despite the
subject and the title, there is nothing in the least "scabrous" in it.
Lacordaire himself, it seems, gave it a "vu et approuve" as being
something that a seminarist or even a priest (which Amaury finishes, to
the great annoyance of George Sand, as being) might have composed for
edifying purposes. But the whole is written to show the truth of a
quatrain of the Judicious Poet: