Life and its farrago—of which I desire not to speak disrespectfully more than of any other equator, but which are not my subject—have rather less exclusive hold in the _Portraits Littéraires_ proper and segregated, but still a greater hold than literature. In those days Sainte-Beuve, as he himself more than once confesses, was even more of a philosopher than of a _littérateur_. There are of course exceptions, where the past greatness of the author takes the future greatness of the critic by storm beforehand, and forces acquaintance and recognition from its destined brother. Even in these cases one often feels that the critic “is not ready”—that the hour has not fully come. The early and strongly “Romantic” articles on the great classics of the seventeenth century, which open the first volume, are not merely wrong with the crudity of early partisanship, as he himself represents them. Indeed in this respect they are hardly wrong at all. But they are not right in the right way. Except the very remarkable piece, “Du Génie Critique et de Bayle,” where the vocation asserted itself, there is hardly one of them (if even this is) worthy of Sainte-Beuve. The “Diderot,” to make a move forward, is capital on the man, a little short of capital on the writer. The best critical thing in the volume is the “Nodier”—much later in date (1840) than the rest of its contents. The second volume, which has something of this advantage, in point of time, contains much better things:—the well-known “Molière,” the long (some would say the disproportionately long) “Fontanes,” the “Joseph de Maistre,”[576] the “Naudé,” and a delightful paper on Aloysius Bertrand of _Gaspard de la Nuit_,[577] which combines the old Romantic enthusiasm with the acquired craftsmanship. The third, better still in this latter respect, has less interesting subjects, except in the case of the “Theocritus” and the “Mlle. Aissé,” which is again a “Portrait de Femme,” hardly at all literary. A sacred shame invades me at even appearing to speak disrespectfully of this book. Compared with anything not of its author’s, and not of that author’s at a future time, it would be very great: but its greater younger brothers are its enemies. [Sidenote: _The_ Portraits Contemporains.]