[Footnote A:  Causeries du Lundi.  Par C.A.  Sainte-Beuve, de l’Academie Francaise.  Tome Quatorzieme.  Paris:  Garnier Freres. 12mo. pp. 480.]

Of quite a different school is M. Armand de Pontmartin, who, under the titles of “Causeries du Samedi,” “Causeries Litteraires,” etc., has now issued over a dozen volumes touching on all points of contemporary letters, often very severe in their strictures.  The last, “Les Semaines Litteraires,"[B] contains notices of late works by Cousin, About, Quinet, Laprade, and others, and concludes with an article on Scribe.  Pontmarlin represents the Catholic sentiment in literature.  He measures everything as it agrees or disagrees with Legitimacy and Ultramontanism.  His works are a continual defence of the Bourbons and the Pope.  Modern democracy he cannot pardon.  Without seeking to deny the excesses and shortcomings of his own party, he finds an explanation for all in the levelling tendencies of the age.  He cannot be too severe on the first French Revolution and its results.  “In letters,” he tells us, “it has led to materialism and anarchy, while the Bourbons personify for France peace, glory,” etc.

[Footnote B:  Les Semaines Litteraires.  Troisieme Serie des Causeries Litteraires.  Par Armand de Pontmartin.  Paris:  Michel Levy Freres. 12mo. pp. 364.]

Pontmartin is an able representative of the side he has taken.  He believes in and ably defends those heroes of literature so well characterized as “Prophets of the Past,” Chateaubriand, De Bonald, and J. de Maistre.  His special objects of antipathy are writers like Michelet and Quinet, pamphleteers like About, and critics like Sainte-Beuve.

The last he cannot pardon for his work on Chateaubriand,[C] published in the early part of the year 1861.  The time is past for giving a fuller account of this remarkable production of the historian of Port-Royal.  Suffice it to say, that, though it deals in very small criticism indeed, though its author seems to have made it his task to sum up all the weaknesses of one the prestige of whose name fills, in France at least, the first half of this century, yet there exists no more valuable contribution to the history of literature under the first Empire.  It has been called “a work no one would wish to have written, yet which is read by all with exquisite pleasure.”  Nothing could be truer.

[Footnote C:  Chateaubriand et son Groupe Litteraire sous l’Empire.  Cours professe a Liege en 1848-1849, par C.A.  Sainte-Beuve, de l’Academie Francaise.  Paris:  Garnier Freres. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 410, 457.]

“Chateaubriand and his Literary Group under the Empire” is a course of twenty-one lectures delivered by Sainte-Beuve at Liege, whither he repaired soon after the Revolution of 1848 broke out in Paris.  Fragments of the work appeared in the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” among others the paper on Chenedolle, which forms the most interesting portion of the second division.  In this are to be found several original letters, now published for the first time, casting much new light on the life of that unfortunate poet.