of literary talent, a sign much more sure and delicate, than all the art of satire.”  By the side of this may be placed a sentence he cites from Grimm:  “People who so easily admire bad things are not in a state to enjoy good.”  How true and cheering is this:  “There is in each of us a primitive ideal being, whom Nature has wrought with her finest and most maternal hand, but whom man too often covers up, smothers, or corrupts.”  Speaking of the sixteenth century, he says:  “What it wanted was taste, if by taste we understand choice clean and perfect, the disengagement of the elements of the beautiful.”  When, to give a paragraph its fit ending, the thought allows of an epigrammatic point, if he does not happen to have one of his own he knows where to borrow just what is wanted.  Speaking of embellished oratorical diction, he quotes Talleyrand on some polished oration that was discussed in his presence:  “It is not enough to have fine sentences:  you must have something to put into them.”  Commenting on the hyper-spirituality of M. Laprade, he says:  “M.  Laprade starts from the absolute notion of being.  For him the following is the principle of Art,—­’to manifest what we feel of the Absolute Being, of the Infinite, of God, to make him known and felt by other men, such in its generality is the end of Art.’  Is this true, is it false?  I know not:  at this elevation one always gets into the clouds.  Like the most of those who pride themselves on metaphysics, he contents himself with words (il se paye de mots).”  Here is a grand thought, that flashes out of the upper air of poetry:  “Humanity, that eternal child that has never done growing.”

M. Sainte-Beuve’s irony, keen and delicate, is a sprightly medium of truth:  witness this passage on a new volume of M. Michelet:  “Narrative, properly so called, which never was his forte, is almost entirely sacrificed.  Seek here no historical highway, well laid, solid, and continuous; the method adopted is absolute points of view; you run with him on summits, peaks, on needles of granite, which he selects at his pleasure to gets views from.  The reader leaps from steeple to steeple.  M. Michelet seems to have proposed to himself an impossible wager, which, however, he has won,—­to write history with a series of flashes.”  Could there be a more subtle, covert way of saying of a man that he is hardened by self-esteem than the following on M. Guizot:  “The consciousness that he has of himself, and a natural principle of pride, place him easily above the little susceptibilities of self-love.”  M. Sainte-Beuve is not an admirer of Louis Philippe, and among other sly hits gives him the following:  “Louis Philippe was too much like a bourgeois himself to be long respected by the bourgeoisie.  Just as in former times the King of France was only the first gentleman of the kingdom, he was nothing but the first bourgeois of the country.”  What witty satire on Lamartine he introduces, with