style most inclined to the jargonish,[580] the “Senancour,” and in part the “Lamennais,” demand special notice, while the opening of the “Béranger,” with its sketch of the _causerie_ method, is of extreme interest, and the frequent references to English writers[581] show us already the largeness of the critic’s equipment. The Second is perhaps to be more cordially welcomed for the miscellanies at its end (including the striking critical imaginations put into the mouths of Diderot and Hazlitt) than for any of its more imposing constituents. The “Balzac” article, though it is in the main just, has a harshness and a touch of personal rudeness about it which are very unusual in Sainte-Beuve, and not quite explicable. The novelist might certainly be excused for thinking it wantonly uncivil. It is a little distressing, too, to read the hostile appendix which Sainte-Beuve ill-advisedly put to his “Montalembert” paper. But “_Misères que tout cela!_” The “Ballenche” and the “Villemain,” the “Mme. Desbordes-Valmore” and the “Ulric Guttinguer,”[582] nearly, if not quite, take the taste out. In vol. iii., an extremely interesting opening on Vinet, and a good close on Mérimée, hold between them things even better and sometimes well known— the “Töpffer,” the “Xavier de Mestre,” the “Jasmin,” the “J. J. Ampère”— and show, in the “Magnin” and elsewhere, that admirably _horizontal_ view of all periods of French literature which Sainte-Beuve was almost the first to take, and in which he has had far too few followers, whether in regard to French literature or others.