The book itself[241] is a very curious one. Originally making its bow as a couple of review articles, it received all sorts of accretions, internal and appended, and, in its latest form especially, is something of a _potpourri_. The title so far applies to the whole that the author is generally supporting the _methods_ of Shakespeare against the _methods_ of Racine: but a very small portion of the book is directly occupied with either. And an unwary reader, expecting to find a straightforward and consistent Romantic propaganda, may be almost hopelessly puzzled, not merely by Beyle’s zigzag digressions striking in all directions like forked lightning, but by such things as his constant and sustained polemic against Molière, who has generally been the one writer of the _grand siècle_ (or with Corneille one of the two writers) taken under Romantic protection. In fact no book can better illustrate the confusion and yeastiness of thought in that early Romantic period, and the unconquerable, even when perverse, idiosyncrasy and individuality of Beyle himself. Much of the piece is an attack upon verse-tragedy _as_ verse, for here, as elsewhere, this partisan of the greatest of all poets distinctly frowns on poetry as such. He bases himself on Scott almost as much as on Shakespeare, yet he is terribly disturbed by Sir Walter’s politics, and recurs again and again, more in sorrow than in anger, but with singular lack of humour,[242] to the story of the glass that George IV. drank out of, and that Scott first pocketed and then sat upon. Politics, indeed, run very high throughout, and one is never quite sure that Beyle’s dislike of Racine and Molière is not mainly (he would himself admit it as partly) based on dislike of an absolute monarchy and a courtly state of society. Here he divagates into a long controversy with the unfortunate _perruque_ Auger: elsewhere into an almost totally irrelevant excursus on Lord Byron, Italy, and the wickedness of the English aristocracy. Yet he cannot help being critically valuable almost everywhere, and he generally “says true things,” though he constantly “calls them by wrong names.” How forcible and original is the definition of Scott’s[243] form of novel as “a romantic tragedy [or, we may add, ‘a romantic comedy’], with long inserted descriptions.” His battle[244] early in the piece with a “Classic” on the dramatic _illusion parfaite_ and _illusion imparfaite_, is conducted in a masterly and victorious manner, though some of us would like to challenge the victor to another duel, on the point whether _theatrical_ illusion is not always, and of necessity, even less than “imperfect,” and whether to obtain perfect “illusion” you must not _read_ and read only.[245] Excellently acute too, for his time, though to ours it may seem a truism, is his attribution of most critical errors to _l’habitude choquée_:[246] and though there is both exaggeration and undue restriction in saying that “Romanticism is the art of giving