his critical work, is it too much to
say of him, that he is not only, as he has been called, the foremost
of living critics, but that he deserves to hold the first place among
all critics? No other has done so much so well. Goethe and Coleridge
are something more; they are critics incidentally; but M.
Sainte-Beuve, with poetical and philosophical qualities that lift him
to a high vantage-ground, has made criticism his life-work, and
through conscientious and symmetrical use of these qualities has done
his work well. Besides much else in his many and many-sided volumes,
there is to be read in them a full, spirited history of French
literature.

Our attempt to make M. Sainte-Beuve better known on this side
the Atlantic we cannot more fitly conclude than with a sketch of
him--a literary sketch--by himself. This we find in the fifth volume
of the "Nouveaux Lundis," in a paper on Moliere, published in July,
1863. A man who, in the autumnal ripeness of his powers, thus frankly
tells us his likes and dislikes, tells us what he is. While by
reflected action the passage becomes a self-portraiture, it is a
sample of finest criticism.

"To make Moliere loved by more people is in my judgment to do a public
service.

"Indeed, to love Moliere--I mean to love him sincerely and with all
one's heart--it is, do you know? to have within one's self a guarantee
against many defects, much wrong-headedness. It is, in the first
place, to dislike what is incompatible with Moliere, all that was
counter to him in his day, and that would have been insupportable to
him in ours.

"To love Moliere is to be forever cured--do not say of base and
infamous hypocrisy, but of fanaticism, of intolerance, and of that
kind of hardness which makes one anathematize and curse; it is to
carry a corrective to admiration even of Bossuet, and for all who,
after his example, exult, were it only in words, over their
enemy dead or dying; who usurp I know not what holy speech, and
involuntarily believe themselves to be, with the thunderbolt in their
hand, in the region and place of the Most High. Men eloquent and
sublime, you are far too much so for me!

"To love Moliere, is to be sheltered against, and a thousand leagues
away from, that other fanaticism, the political, which is cold, dry,
cruel, which never laughs, which smells of the sectary, which, under
pretext of Puritanism, finds means to mix and knead all that is
bitter, and to combine in one sour doctri