judge of a man or book or thing, unless you have some fellow-feeling with him or it; and to judge well you must have much fellow-feeling.  The critic must, moreover, be a thinker; reason is the critic’s sun.  Scott and Byron could say just and fresh things about poets and poetry; but neither could command the whole field, nor dig deep into the soil.  Witness Byron’s deliberate exaltation of Pope.  Whereas Wordsworth and Coleridge were among the soundest of critics, because, besides being poets, they were both profound thinkers.

For the perfecting of the literary critic the especial sympathy needed is that with excellence; for high literature is the outcome of the best there is in humanity, the finished expression of healthiest aspirations, of choicest thoughts, the ripened fruit of noble, of refined growths, the perfected fruit, with all the perfume and beauty of the flower upon it.  Of this sympathy M. Sainte-Beuve, throughout his many volumes, gives overflowing evidence, in addition to that primary proof of having himself written good poems.  Besides the love, he has the instinct, of literature, and this instinct draws him to what is its bloom and fullest manifestation, and his love is the more warm and constant for being discriminative and refined.  Through variety of knowledge, with intellectual keenness, he enjoys excellence in the diversified forms that literature assumes.  His pages abound in illustrations of his versatility, which is nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in the contrast between two successive papers (both equally admirable) in the very first volume of the “Causeries du Lundi,” the one on Madame Recamier, the other on Napoleon.  Read especially the series of paragraphs beginning, “Some natures are born pure, and have received quand meme the gift of innocence,” to see how gracefully, subtly, delicately, with what a feminine tenderness, he draws the portrait of this most fascinating of women, this beautiful creature, for whom grace and sweetness did even still more than beauty, this fairy-queen of France, this refined coquette, who drew to her hundreds of hearts, this kindly magician, who turned all her lovers into friends.  Then pass directly to the next paper, on the terrible Corsican, “who weakened his greatness by the gigantic—­who loved to astonish—­who delighted too much in what was his forte, war,—­who was too much a bold adventurer.”  And further on, the account of Napoleon’s conversation with Goethe at Weimar, in which account M. Sainte-Beuve shows how fully he values the largeness and truthfulness and penetration of the great German.  The impression thus made on the reader as to the variousness of M. Sainte-Beuve’s power is deepened by another paper in the same volume, that on M. Guizot and his historic school, a masterly paper, which reasons convincingly against those historians “who strain humanity, who make the lesson that history teaches too direct and stiff, who put themselves in the place of Providence,” which, as is said in another place (vol. v. p. 150), “is often but a deification of our own thought.”