From all this men must come to the fifteen volumes with high expectations—a little chequered perhaps in the case of the wary by some cautions of Sainte-Beuve’s.[240] To describe the result as unmixed disappointment would be unfair. The mere dates and contents of the books taken together establish the fact that the debt owed by literary and critical history to Villemain is great, and one of those which will never be written off the _grand livre_ of the subject. That between 1816, the year of his appointment as Professor, and 1828, that of the first publication of his _Cours de la Littérature Française_, French students first, and then French readers, had presented to them for the first time a survey of their literature, which included a historical view of its own origins and earlier achievements, and something like a comparative view of the achievements of other nations, is a thing the greatness of which is not likely to be denied or minimised here. Villemain’s style is always correct and agreeable, and he did much to establish, for French criticism in the nineteenth-century, that repute for “honeying the cup,” which has become something of a superstition. Sainte-Beuve, in the passage just referred to, may give him a little too much credit for acuteness and wit in his individual observations, but he has both. [Sidenote: _Deductions to be made from them._] Unluckily, however, the entries on the other side of the sheet are numerous and grave. There is not merely the fault, which his great successor justly brings against him—a fault from which, by the way, Sainte-Beuve himself was by no means free—that Villemain is afraid of _concluding_, that he seldom or never gives you a clear, “grasped,” summed-up view of his whole subject or man. Very few critics do. But in details also his work is too often unsatisfactory. His numerous “Reports” on academic competitions, which give opportunity for excellent criticism, are elegant, but hollow and rhetorical, as is his rather famous _Tableau de l’Eloquence Chrétienne au IVème Siècle_. His notices of various ancient and modern writers are much boiled down from others, with the result, not usual in physical boiling-down, of being not thick but thin—those of Lucretius, and of the tempting and almost virgin subject of the Greek Romances, especially so. Comparative and liberal as he is, his judgment of Shakespeare will not stand beside Lemercier’s (he says definitely that Shakespeare does _not_ provide, in the same proportion as the Greeks, “universal beauties”), and his estimate of Milton is beggarly beside Chateaubriand’s. With all his reputation for rehabilitating mediæval literature, he seems to have known it little: he is not merely very superficial on Chaucer, which might be pardonable in a Frenchman, but actually sweeps the mighty volume of the _Chansons de geste_ away at one stroke by the words “we had no poetry at once rude and vigorous.” He is sound upon _Ossian_—that craze was dying and could