l no doubt often
perceive, in this or that paragraph or paper, a heightening or a
subduing of color not visible to the foreigner, who cannot so well
trace the marks of political, religious, or personal influences. His
perfected praise M. Sainte-Beuve reserves for those of the illustrious
dead who are embalmed in their own excellence. Besides devoting many
papers (among the most valuable of the series) to these magnates of
literature, he delights in frequent illustrative reference to them,--a
sign this of ripe culture in a critic, and of trustworthiness.

Out of the severe things occasionally said, the sting is mostly taken
by the temper in which they are said, or by the frank recognition of
virtues and beauties beside vices and blemishes. In the general tone
there is a clear humanity, a seemly gentlemanliness. Of the
humane spirit wherewith M. Sainte-Beuve tempers condemnation, take the
following as one of many instances. In the correspondence of Lamennais
there is laid bare such contradictions between his earlier and his
later sentiments on religious questions, that the reader is thus
feelingly guarded against being too harsh in his censure: "Let us cast
a look on ourselves, and ask if in our lives, in our hearts, from
youth to our latter years, there are none of these boundless
distances, these secret abysses, these moral ruins, perhaps, which,
for being hidden, are none the less real and profound."

Writing weekly for the _feuilleton_ of a Paris daily journal, M.
Sainte-Beuve cannot but be sometimes diffuse; but his diffuseness is
always animated, never languid. Fluent, conversational, ever polished,
he is full of happy turns and of Gallic sprightliness. When the
occasion offers, he is concise, condensed even in the utterance of a
principle or of a comprehensive thought. "Admiration is a much finer
test of literary talent, a sign much more sure and delicate, than all
the art of satire." By the side of this may be placed a sentence he
cites from Grimm: "People who so easily admire bad things are
not in a state to enjoy good." How true and cheering is this: "There
is in each of us a primitive ideal being, whom Nature has wrought with
her finest and most maternal hand, but whom man too often covers up,
smothers, or corrupts." Speaking of the sixteenth century, he says:
"What it wanted was taste, if by taste we understand choice clean and
perfect, the disengagement of the elements of the beautiful." When, to
give a par