survive even rudimentary comparative study of literature in no one of talent; and his thirty-ninth and fortieth lectures in the _Cours_ on Criticism itself deserve to be very well spoken of. But on the whole he is disappointing. We must, of course, make allowance—very large allowance—for a pioneer who begins early, who finds others, during the course of his long life, extending his own explorations far beyond his own limits, and who, from other engagements, from routine, or from sheer disenchantment or worse, declines to follow them; we must increase it for his industry in other matters; we must give him his just part and royalty in the accomplishment of those who followed, and not a few of whom he actually taught, while all owed him something indirectly. But intrinsically and absolutely I do not find him a very great or even a very good critic. He is deficient in enthusiasm, in originality, in grasp: nor does he quite make up the deficiency by erudition and method. [Sidenote: _Beyle._] Two remarkable persons, one standing apart a little—as he, like his disciple Mérimée, always and in all things did—the other a polyhistoric talent just short of genius, have yet to be mentioned: and these are Henri Beyle and Charles Nodier. Beyle was, in a sense, nothing if not critical; and the spirit of criticism pervades all his work, both the earlier and better known novels and nondescripts, and the posthumous volumes (deserving very much the same alliteration), which have more recently been made known by the devoted labours of M. Stryienski. But the “place” for his literary criticism is, of course, _Racine et Shakespeare_, published in 1822, ere yet the Romantic party (to which Beyle himself never belonged) was fully formed, but when the principles “atmosphered” by Diderot, and held in various ways and degrees from Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael onward, had already begun to influence Frenchmen at large. [Sidenote: _Racine et Shakespeare._]