people themselves pleasure, Classicism that of giving them what pleased their grandfathers,”[247] we know what he means. He is very sound on taste and fashion; and his severity on Voltaire is refreshing, because it cannot be attributed, as it is the fashion to attribute severities on that patriarch, to the _odium theologicum_. The whole, even in its singularities and shortcomings, is an invaluable testimony to the set of the current at the time:[248] but its words are not lightly to be taken as other than “words to the wise,” and they are not invariably the words _of_ the wise. [Sidenote: _His attitude here_] Beyle’s attitude in this tract has been commented on in a fashion very illuminative (if you apply the proper checks in each case) by two persons of unsurpassed competence, but not of quite unsurpassed disinterestedness, Mérimée and Sainte-Beuve. The former[249] says plumply, “Pour lui la poésie était lettre close,” and quotes the famous _boutade_ in _De l’Amour_, that “Verse was invented as an aid to memory.” His objection, says his disciple, to Racine (who “met with his sovereign displeasure”) was that he had no character or local colour: his reasons of preference for Shakespeare, that poet’s knowledge of the human heart, the life and individuality of his characters, his command of the nicest shades of passion and sentiment. Sainte-Beuve, on his side,[250] affects rather to pooh-pooh the whole matter, as if it were a battle of kites and crows, where the blood (if any) has been long absorbed, the torn feathers blown away, and the dust settled to quietness. Beyle was a fairly early, but excited and not quite judicious partaker in it. He was unjust to La Harpe (Sainte-Beuve defending La Harpe is rather good!), too much on the side of the _Edinburgh Review_ (this is better,[251] the “Blue and Yellow” as a Romantic organ!). One remembers, of course, at once that both these great men of letters were, if not exactly deserters and traitors in regard to Romanticism, at any rate Romantics whose first love had grown pretty cold. Yet we must not forget to notice that Sainte-Beuve practically confirms Mérimée on Beyle’s “exclusion of poetry” in judging even Shakespeare. [Sidenote: _and elsewhere._]