lf-sacrificing Frenchman, this exemplar of
moral greatness, Lord Lansdowne wrote many years before the French
Revolution: "I have seen for the first time in my life what I did not
believe could exist, that is, a man _who is exempt from fear and from
hope_, and who nevertheless is full of life and warmth. Nothing can
disturb his peace; nothing is necessary to him, and he takes a lively
interest in all that is good."

In a paper on a volume of miscellaneous prose essays by M. Laprade, M.
Sainte-Beuve has this sentence: "What strikes me above all and
everywhere is, that the author, whether he reasons or whether he
addresses himself to literary history, only understands his own mode
of being and his own individuality. Hereby he reveals to us
that he is not a critic." The first paragraph of a keen critique on M.
de Pontmartin ends thus: "To say of even those writers who are opposed
to us nothing which their judicious friends do not already think and
are obliged to admit, this is my highest ambition." Discussing the
proper method of dealing with the past, he writes: "For myself I
respect tradition and I like novelty: I am never happier than when I
can succeed in reconciling them together." Of Hoffman he says, in a
paper on literary criticism: "He has many of the qualities of a true
critic, conscientiousness, independence, ideas, an opinion of his
own." These sentences, with others of like import, are keys to the
character of the volumes from which they are taken. The office of the
critic M. Sainte-Beuve administers, not for temporary or personal
ends, but with a disinterested sense of its elevation and its
responsibilities. Through healthy sympathies and knowledge ample and
ripe, through firm sense with artistic flexibility, through largeness
of view and subtlety of insight, he enters upon it more than
ordinarily empowered for its due discharge. He is at once what the
French call _fin_ and what the English call "sound." In
literary work, in biographical work, in work aesthetical and critical,
he delights, and he has a wide capacity of appropriation. The spirit
of a book, a man, an age, he seizes quickly. With a nice perception of
shades he catches the individual color of a mind or a production; and
by the same faculty he grasps the determining principles in a
character. Delicately, strongly, variously endowed, there is a steady
equilibrium among his fine powers. Considering the bulk and vast
variety and general excellence of