is demoralizing and deadening. But toward the end of the
paper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so high
as some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgment
of Joubert: "Of the novels of Le Sage it may be said that they seem to
have been written in a _cafe_, by a player of dominoes, on coming out
of the comic theatre."

Without being over-diffident, we may feel our footing not perfectly
secure on French ground when we differ from a Frenchman; we are
therefore not sorry to catch M. Sainte-Beuve tripping on English
ground. In a review of the translation of the celebrated Letters of
Lord Chesterfield--whom he calls the La Rochefoucauld of England--he
refers to, and in part quotes, the passages in which Chesterfield
gives his son advice as to his _liaisons_; and he adds: "All
Chesterfield's morality, on this head, is resumed in a line of
Voltaire,--

"Il n'est jamais de mal en bonne compagnie."

It is these passages that make the grave Dr. Johnson blush: we only
smile at them." For ourselves, we blush with Johnson, not that the man
of the world should give to his youthful son, living at a corrupt
Continental court, counsel as to relations which were regarded as
inevitable in such a circle; but that the heart of the father should
not have poured (were it but parenthetically) through the pen of the
worldling some single sentence like this: "Writing to you, my son, as
an experienced man of the world to one inexperienced, I recommend the
good taste in such matters and the delicacy which become a gentleman;
but to his dear boy, your father says, avoid, if possible, such
_liaisons_; preserve your purity; nothing will give you such a return
throughout the whole of the future." But, a single sentence like this
would _vitiate_ the entire Chesterfieldian correspondence.

How fully and warmly M. Sainte-Beuve prizes moral worth may be learnt
from many passages. Not the least animated and cordial of his
papers is one on the Abbe Gerbet, in the sixth volume, a paper which
shows, as Gustave Planche said of him, that "he studies with his
heart, as women do;" and one in the second volume on Malesherbes, whom
he describes as being "separated, on the moral side, from the
Mirabeaus and the Condorcets not by a shade, but by an abyss," and
whom he sums up as "great magistrate, minister too sensitive and too
easily discouraged, heroic advocate, and sublime victim." Of this
noble, deeply dutiful, se