on the domestic, books, too, are liable; but to books as being more abstract than usages, more ideal than manners, an absolute moral standard can with less difficulty be applied.  Applying it to Gil Blas, is not M. Sainte-Beuve subject to arraignment when he speaks of this and the other writings of Le Sage as being “the mirror of the world?” Moliere, too, is a satirist, and from his breadth a great one; and surely the world he holds a mirror before is a much purer world than that of Le Sage; and what of the Shakespearean world?  The world of Le Sage is a nether world.  “Of Gil Blas it has been well said that the book is moral like experience.”  The experience one may get in brothels and “hells,” in consorting with pimps and knaves, has in it lessons of virtue and morality,—­for those who can extract them; but even for these few it is a very partial teaching; and for the many who cannot read so spiritually, whether in the book or the brothel, the experience is demoralizing and deadening.  But toward the end of the paper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so high as some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgment of Joubert:  “Of the novels of Le Sage it may be said that they seem to have been written in a cafe, by a player of dominoes, on coming out of the comic theatre.”

Without being over-diffident, we may feel our footing not perfectly secure on French ground when we differ from a Frenchman; we are therefore not sorry to catch M. Sainte-Beuve tripping on English ground.  In a review of the translation of the celebrated Letters of Lord Chesterfield—­whom he calls the La Rochefoucauld of England—­he refers to, and in part quotes, the passages in which Chesterfield gives his son advice as to his liaisons; and he adds:  “All Chesterfield’s morality, on this head, is resumed in a line of Voltaire,—­

  “Il n’est jamais de mal en bonne compagnie.”

It is these passages that make the grave Dr. Johnson blush:  we only smile at them.”  For ourselves, we blush with Johnson, not that the man of the world should give to his youthful son, living at a corrupt Continental court, counsel as to relations which were regarded as inevitable in such a circle; but that the heart of the father should not have poured (were it but parenthetically) through the pen of the worldling some single sentence like this:  “Writing to you, my son, as an experienced man of the world to one inexperienced, I recommend the good taste in such matters and the delicacy which become a gentleman; but to his dear boy, your father says, avoid, if possible, such liaisons; preserve your purity; nothing will give you such a return throughout the whole of the future.”  But, a single sentence like this would vitiate the entire Chesterfieldian correspondence.