on the later school, adorned by Victor
Hugo, who, with notions of art elaborately wrong, is still a man
of extraordinary genius, had not risen into its present equivocal
reputation.

"I find no fault with the sentimentalists," answered the severe critic,
"but that of exceeding feebleness. They have no bone and muscle in their
genius--all is flaccid and rotund in its feminine symmetry. They seem to
think that vigour consists in florid phrases and little aphorisms, and
delineate all the mighty tempests of the human heart with the polished
prettiness of a miniature-painter on ivory. No!--these two are children
of another kind--affected, tricked-out, well-dressed children--very
clever, very precocious--but children still. Their whinings, and their
sentimentalities, and their egotism, and their vanity, cannot interest
masculine beings who know what life and its stern objects are."

"Your brother-in-law," said Maltravers with a slight smile, "must find
in you a discouraging censor."

"My poor Castruccio," replied De Montaigne, with a half-sigh; "he is one
of those victims whom I believe to be more common than we dream of--men
whose aspirations are above their powers. I agree with a great German
writer, that in the first walks of Art no man has a right to enter,
unless he is convinced that he has strength and speed for the goal.
Castruccio might be an amiable member of society, nay, an able and
useful man, if he would apply the powers he possesses to the rewards
they may obtain. He has talent enough to win him reputation in any
profession but that of a poet."

"But authors who obtain immortality are not always first-rate."

"First-rate in their way, I suspect; even if that way be false or
trivial. They must be connected with the _history_ of their literature;
you must be able to say of them, 'In this school, be it bad or good,
they exerted such and such an influence;' in a word, they must form a
link in the great chain of a nation's authors, which may be afterwards
forgotten by the superficial, but without which the chain would be
incomplete. And thus, if not first-rate for all time, they have
been first-rate in their own day. But Castruccio is only the echo of
others--he can neither found a school nor ruin one. Yet this" (again
added De Montaigne after a pause)--"this melancholy malady in my
brother-in-law would cure itself, perhaps, if he were not Italian. In
your animated and bustling country, after sufficient disappoi