lf the high priest; adulation was not enough--he demanded
adoration; and he received it. He had a habit of contemplating himself
from an objective but highly-idealizing point of view, best expressed by
saying that he had a hero-worship for himself: his memoirs and other
autobiographical writings are full of it, and in his intercourse it
perpetually overflowed. "That is the brow they have tried to bend to the
dust!" he exclaimed, standing before his own likeness in Ary Scheffer's
studio. Lord Houghton, among his many good stories, had one of spending
an evening at Lamartine's in Paris with a circle of celebrities. Alfred
de Vigny, who had been out of town, presented himself. "Welcome back!"
said Lamartine magnificently. "You come from the provinces: do they
admire us down there?"--"They adore you," replied De Vigny with a bow.
The conversation was a prolonged paean to the host, with choral strophe
and antistrophe. One of the party began to rehearse the aspects in which
Lamartine was the greatest man in France--"As a poet, as an orator, as
an historian, as a statesman;" and as he paused, "And as a _soldier_,"
added Lamartine with a sublime gesture, "if ever France shall need him."
This may have been the country neighbor who, we learn from Sainte-Beuve,
pronounced Lamartine to be Fenelon without his didacticism, Rousseau
without his sophistry, Mirabeau without his incendiary notions. Still,
there were asides in the dialogue. One evening, the week before the
overthrow of the provisional government of which Lamartine was
president, he had a crowded reception, and, notwithstanding the failure
and imminent downfall of his administration, he was radiant with
satisfaction. "What can M. de Lamartine have to be so pleased about?"
said one of his friends to another. "He is pleased with himself," was
the reply.--"One of those speeches," observes Sainte-Beuve, "which only
friends find to make." But Lamartine was by no means solitary in this
infatuation. Sainte-Beuve remarks that "Nothing is so common in our
days: some think themselves God, some the Son of God, some archangels.
Pierre Leroux thinks himself the first, De Vigny the last: Lamartine is
a good prince--he is satisfied to be a seraph."

These books give us daily glimpses of Paris thirty years ago, of that
incessant mental movement, inquiry, desire for novelty and vivacity of
transient interest which dazzle the brain as the scintillation of the
sun upon the unstable waves does