It is common, if not universal, to glance at the redoubtable and satiric doctor, Gui Patin, as at least an outlier among French seventeenth-century critics; but the reader who, as Matthew Arnold says, “wants criticism” will not find much of it in his very amusing _Letters_.[337] [Sidenote: _Gui Patin—his judgment of Browne._] An _English_ reader may be specially disappointed because he is most likely to know the surprising, the repeated, the, to all appearance, fully genuine, and the very felicitous remarks[338] of Patin on the _Religio Medici_. A Frenchman who can appreciate Browne, who can see in the _Religio_ a book not merely _tout gentil et curieux_ but _fort délicat et tout mystique_, who can perceive its _étranges et ravissantes pensées_, who can pronounce _il n’y a guère encore de livre de la sorte_ (alas! we may drop the _guère_ and continue the _encore_), who can describe the author as a _mélancolique agréable en ses pensées_, who can say of his stupid commentators _ce livre n’a pas besoin de tels écoliers_, and even desire ardently to be acquainted with Sir Kenelm Digby’s reply—may seem to have handed in his credentials as a critic once and for all. But one soon finds that Patin’s interest in Browne was, first of all, _esprit de corps_ (which was perhaps stronger in the Faculty of that time than in any profession of any other), and secondly, a certain coincidence of true but unconventional piety, different as were its forms in the two. Elsewhere Patin is a collector, an eager student of new books, a scholar even, with a conviction that Scaliger and Casaubon were “the two first men of their time,” and that Salmasius was a “grand héros des belles lettres”; but not a critic, and with a distinctly limited idea of _belles lettres_ themselves. He speaks contemptuously of Descartes, he barely mentions Corneille. He was, in fact, generally too angry with antimony, opium, quinine, the English, and Mazarin, or else too much rapt in ecstasy at the divine powers of bleeding and purging,[339] to have time to think of poetry, or even of prose. ----- Footnote 337: Ed. Réveillé, Paris, 3 vols. (Paris and London, 1846). Footnote 338: _Ed. cit._, i. 340, 354; ii. 35, 321. Footnote 339: “Certainement il faut en louer Dieu,” says his editor, himself a doctor, with a kind of shudder, in reference to Patin’s pious gratitude for the recovery of a colleague whom he had bled _thirty-two_ times. His exploits in the direction of _ensuita purgare_ are too appalling to particularise. -----