This reappears in the “Fauriel,”[583] which takes up nearly a third of vol. iv., and is there accompanied by an excellent paper on Barante, a longer but much less capital one on Thiers, two of Sainte-Beuve’s best known pieces on Leopardi and Parny, and one—for us—of peculiar interest on Daunou, containing perhaps the most vivid, and at the same time delicate, sketch in existence of the latest type of Neo-classic critic in France, before M. Brunetière’s revival sixty years later,—a type without La Harpe’s exaggeration and caricature, with a certain mildness and toleration towards the newer things, but secretly and _saturatedly_ convinced that Reason is the Goddess of Literature, that fine verse _is_ “almost as good as fine prose,” and that fineness in both consists of absolute good sense, logical connection, grammatical impeccability, and a horror of the _verbum inusitatum_. In this, too, the later and more perfect manner is increasingly present throughout; and, naturally, still more so in the Fifth, where the dates bring us to the very eve of the great period itself, and the essays are sometimes hardly distinguishable from the work thereof. The very best of these, perhaps, are the three classical pieces (for Sainte-Beuve was never prudish about titles, and not more than half of the Portraits in this volume deal with contemporaries in any sense) on Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and Meleager, in which, not for the first time, but for the first time in nearly or quite his full force, he once more makes a new departure in criticism by handling antiquity in true _causerie_ style. But the “Desaugiers,” the “Louise Labé,” and the “Casimir Delavigne” are also noteworthy, while the paper on Gautier’s _Les Grotesques_, a little meticulous and pedagogic in parts, and written in avowed protest of a mild kind, is still more so.[584] [Sidenote: _He “arrives.”_]