How fully and warmly M. Sainte-Beuve prizes moral worth may be learnt from many passages.  Not the least animated and cordial of his papers is one on the Abbe Gerbet, in the sixth volume, a paper which shows, as Gustave Planche said of him, that “he studies with his heart, as women do;” and one in the second volume on Malesherbes, whom he describes as being “separated, on the moral side, from the Mirabeaus and the Condorcets not by a shade, but by an abyss,” and whom he sums up as “great magistrate, minister too sensitive and too easily discouraged, heroic advocate, and sublime victim.”  Of this noble, deeply dutiful, self-sacrificing Frenchman, this exemplar of moral greatness, Lord Lansdowne wrote many years before the French Revolution:  “I have seen for the first time in my life what I did not believe could exist, that is, a man who is exempt from fear and from hope, and who nevertheless is full of life and warmth.  Nothing can disturb his peace; nothing is necessary to him, and he takes a lively interest in all that is good.”

In a paper on a volume of miscellaneous prose essays by M. Laprade, M. Sainte-Beuve has this sentence:  “What strikes me above all and everywhere is, that the author, whether he reasons or whether he addresses himself to literary history, only understands his own mode of being and his own individuality.  Hereby he reveals to us that he is not a critic.”  The first paragraph of a keen critique on M. de Pontmartin ends thus:  “To say of even those writers who are opposed to us nothing which their judicious friends do not already think and are obliged to admit, this is my highest ambition.”  Discussing the proper method of dealing with the past, he writes:  “For myself I respect tradition and I like novelty:  I am never happier than when I can succeed in reconciling them together.”  Of Hoffman he says, in a paper on literary criticism:  “He has many of the qualities of a true critic, conscientiousness, independence, ideas, an opinion of his own.”  These sentences, with others of like import, are keys to the character of the volumes from which they are taken.  The office of the critic M. Sainte-Beuve administers, not for temporary or personal ends, but with a disinterested sense of its elevation and its responsibilities.  Through healthy sympathies and knowledge ample and ripe, through firm sense with artistic flexibility, through largeness of view and subtlety of insight, he enters upon it more than ordinarily empowered for its due discharge.  He is at once what the French call fin and what the English call “sound.”  In literary work, in biographical work, in work aesthetical and critical, he delights, and he has a wide capacity of appropriation.  The spirit of a book, a man, an age, he seizes quickly.  With a nice perception of shades he catches the individual color of a mind or a production; and by the same faculty he grasps the determining principles in a character.  Delicately, strongly, variously endowed, there is a