has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape and sharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to be susceptible of such shaping.  And when we reflect that the task of the critic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, to measure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individual and its composite powers, and, that from every one of the throbbing aggregates, whom it is his office to analyze and portray, issue lines that run on all sides into the infinite, we must conclude that he who is to be the accomplished interpreter, the trusted judge, should be able swiftly to follow these lines.

Long and exacting as is our roll of what is wanted to equip a veritable sure critic, we have yet to add two cardinal qualifications, which by the subject of our present paper are possessed in liberal allotment.  The first is, joy in life, from which the pages of M. Sainte-Beuve derive, not a superficial sprightliness merely, but a mellow, radiant geniality.  The other, which is of still deeper account, is the capacity of admiration; a virtue—­for so it deserves to be called—­born directly of the nobler sensibilities, those in whose presence only can be recognized and enjoyed the lofty and the profound, the beautiful and the true.  He who is not well endowed with these higher senses is not a bad critic; he is no critic at all.  Not only can he not discern the good there is in a man or a work, he can as little discover and expose the bad; for, deficiencies implying failures to reach a certain fullness, implying a falling short of the complete, to say where and what are deficiencies, involves the having in the mind an idea of the full and complete.  The man so meagrely furnished as to hold no such idea is but a carper, not a critic.  To know the bad denotes knowledge of the good; in criticism as in morals, a righteous indignation can only flash from a shock to pure feelings.

In a notice of M. Thiers’ chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve, after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds:  “A man of letters smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem.  But is not a campaign of a great captain equally a work of genius?  Napoleon is here the high sovereign critic, the Goethe in this department, as the Feuquieres, the Jominis, the St. Cyrs are the La Harpes or the Fontanes, the Lessings or the Schlegels, all good and expert critics; but he is the first of all, nor, if you reflect on it, could it have been otherwise.  And who then would say better things of Homer than Milton?”—­Goethe supreme in literary criticism, Milton on Homer; this touches the root of the matter; sympathy with the writer and his work the critic must have,—­sympathy as one of the sources of good judgment, and even of knowledge.  You cannot know, and therefore not