In fact, by about 1845[585] he had very nearly developed his full powers, and he was shaking off the awkward transition state when he had ceased to be _romantique à plusieurs_ (he never was _à tous_) _crins_, and not yet become himself, and himself only. He had almost accomplished the _causerie_, the mixture of biography, and criticism, and “talk about it,” which Dryden, I maintain, is the first to have actually hit upon, which Johnson had strengthened but a little stiffened in the _Lives_, and which he himself re-fashioned by taking hints of depth and insight from Coleridge and the English Companions, touches of grace and _engouement_ out of a score of French eighteenth-century critics, from Fontenelle and Diderot down to Fontanes and Daunou, adding knowledge of literary history, and a not too peremptory theory of time and _milieu_, from the Germans and the ambient air, enthusiasm from the still smouldering hearth of the deserted _cénacle_, and that magic and indefinable dose, that “little of my own sauce,” as Mrs Tibbs has it, which genius provides, and of which it keeps the secret. His ability to concoct this mixture, or rather to produce this new organism, had been by this time almost fully shown; but the final proof was given, and the new kind was definitely named and sent abroad, only after the composition of the most substantive work (except _Port-Royal_) which he had yet attempted, and the best—itself displaying the gifts he had now acquired in the fullest measure. Probably the critical moment was hastened, as so often happens, by an external catastrophe, the upset of the July Monarchy, and by that transplantation into Belgium for a time which, though he has put the best face on it, was certainly an exile, and by no means wholly a voluntary one. [Sidenote: _Port-Royal,_] We must, however, first take some notice of _Port-Royal_, which, either by cause or coincidence, was also the product of a journey, if not an exile, being originally delivered in the form of lectures at Lausanne. It[586] is, of course, the most important and substantive single work of its author—the only one, in fact, to which the older and more exacting definition of a _book_ would have shown itself complaisant. It occupied, with completions and revisions, twenty years of his life; it contains perhaps the most elaborate and masterly exposition of that system of combined literary, historical, and social inquiry into the life of a period which he did so much to introduce, and so much more to establish as a literary Kind; and it expresses and registers notably those changes of opinion which made him, in the last two decades of his life, an exponent of an almost entirely _irreligious_ view of life itself. With this aspect of it we do not here concern ourselves; but the book has far too much which does directly concern us, in the strictest construction of our own plan, not to receive detailed attention. [Sidenote: _its literary episodes._]