Nor do we need these great accuser-compurgators. The singular self-revelations which have been communicated so lavishly of late years, tell us, sometimes on every page, sometimes at longer, but never at very long, intervals, of Beyle’s abiding interest in literature, and of its curious character, Most part of the letters[252] which he, as little more than a boy, wrote to his younger sister, Pauline, is occupied with literary and educational advice, nearly as surprising in its meticulous and affectionate pedagogism as the writer’s almost contemporary _Journal_ is in very different ways. In both, and elsewhere, we find the ever-growing passion for Shakespeare, from the dramatic and psychological side, the ever-growing distaste for Racine, the admiration of Corneille, and the contempt of Voltaire—the latter an excellent subject for separate and careful study, inasmuch as we have in it Beyle’s Romanticism engaging and overcoming his anti-religiosity. Among the most curious documents noted here—where I think I have noted some that are curious—is the letter to Pauline of May 12, 1807, from Berlin, where Beyle has just discovered _Lenore_ “across the veil which covers the genius of the German tongue from” him, and thinks it very touching. Indeed Beyle in point of criticism is _polypidax_: though the streams are, as it were, underground for the most part, they gush out in the most apparently unlikely places. I have dozens of noted passages, for instance, in that singular and most readable book the _Mémoires d’un Touriste_,[253] certainly not a probable title-source of our matter, and some even in the _Promenades dans Rome_. He resembled Hazlitt in the way in which his criticism was liable to be distorted and poisoned by extra-literary prejudice, more particularly of the anti-clerical kind. I never knew a man so tormented with the idea of something in which he did not—or said he did not—believe, as Beyle is with the idea of Hell. It sometimes makes him very nearly silly, and constantly makes him lose occasions of combined magnanimity and pure literary judgment, as wherever he speaks of Joseph de Maistre.[254] But, as in Hazlitt’s case also, you seldom or never find a literary judgment of Beyle’s, free from prejudice, which is not sound. [Sidenote: _Nodier._]