One of the busiest functions of the critic being to sift the multifarious harvest of contemporaneous literature, he must have a hand that can shake hard,—­and hit hard, too, at times.  For fifteen years M. Sainte-Beuve furnished once a week, under the title of “Causeries du Lundi,” a critical paper, to a Paris daily journal; not short, rapid notices, but articles that would cover seven or eight pages of one of our double-columned monthly magazines.  He was thus ever in the thick of the literary melee.  Attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, there will be wherever men do congregate; the aesthetic plane is as open as any other to personal preferences and friendships.  A literary circle as large as that of Paris, if too miscellaneous and extensive to become one multitudinous mutual-admiration-society, will, through cliques and coteries, betray some of its vices.  In this voluminous series of papers the critical pen, when most earnestly eulogistic or most sharply incisive, is wielded with so much skill and art and fine temper, that personality is seldom transpicuous.  The Parisian reader will no doubt often perceive, in this or that paragraph or paper, a heightening or a subduing of color not visible to the foreigner, who cannot so well trace the marks of political, religious, or personal influences.  His perfected praise M. Sainte-Beuve reserves for those of the illustrious dead who are embalmed in their own excellence.  Besides devoting many papers (among the most valuable of the series) to these magnates of literature, he delights in frequent illustrative reference to them,—­a sign this of ripe culture in a critic, and of trustworthiness.

Out of the severe things occasionally said, the sting is mostly taken by the temper in which they are said, or by the frank recognition of virtues and beauties beside vices and blemishes.  In the general tone there is a clear humanity, a seemly gentlemanliness.  Of the humane spirit wherewith M. Sainte-Beuve tempers condemnation, take the following as one of many instances.  In the correspondence of Lamennais there is laid bare such contradictions between his earlier and his later sentiments on religious questions, that the reader is thus feelingly guarded against being too harsh in his censure:  “Let us cast a look on ourselves, and ask if in our lives, in our hearts, from youth to our latter years, there are none of these boundless distances, these secret abysses, these moral ruins, perhaps, which, for being hidden, are none the less real and profound.”

Writing weekly for the feuilleton of a Paris daily journal, M. Sainte-Beuve cannot but be sometimes diffuse; but his diffuseness is always animated, never languid.  Fluent, conversational, ever polished, he is full of happy turns and of Gallic sprightliness.  When the occasion offers, he is concise, condensed even in the utterance of a principle or of a comprehensive thought.  “Admiration is a much finer test