The hundreds of articles and the thousands of passages which these eight-and-twenty volumes present are naturally difficult to deal with after the method which has been here adopted; but a few pages may be fairly devoted to a selection from the _notabilia_ with which “the sweet compulsion” of reading them through again for the purpose has provided me freshly. At the very beginning, and in the first volume, though it is one of the most brilliant of all, Sainte-Beuve is rather militant: he never became quite Olympian. The opening article on Saint-Marc Girardin[599] (between whom and our critic there was always a little friction) has a good deal of “malice” in the French, if not exactly in the English, sense: and that which follows on Lamartine’s _Confidences_, with a later one on _Raphael_, though just enough, is distinctly cruel, and savours of political vengeance on the fallen dictator. But these ticklish and disgustful contemporaneities give way to those perfect studies of the Sévignés (if it be not profane to speak of that person in the plural), the Hamiltons, the Jouberts, the Comines, the Firdousis, which we associate most happily and most characteristically with Sainte-Beuve. There is less, though there is some, of the wholly welcome dealing with technically “ancient” literature: but there are two consummate articles of “criticism in the second intention”—the papers on “Villemain and Cousin as Men of Letters,” and on “Feletz, and Empire Criticism.” The second volume or semester of this Annus Mirabilis—for the two cover the whole twelvemonth from October 1 to September 30, 1849-1850, with exactly fifty-two articles told down for the fifty-two weeks[600]— contains the famous and generous “Mlle. de Lespinasse”; the “Huet,” which is perhaps as good an example as one can find of the whole in some ways; the admirable “Chesterfield”; a wonderfully just “Mazarin”; the “Gil Blas,” which will be reprinted with _Gil Blas_ for centuries; and that magnanimous and yet not uncritical adjustment of coals of fire which Sainte-Beuve set alight in honour of the death of Balzac,—all of them varied, picked out, and set off by a profusion of studies of the eighteenth century, less literary in substance but literary enough in connection, and prefaced in one case, that of the “Madame du Châtelet,” with a most ingenious link, conduit, or what shall we call it? of explanatory connection between the purely literary and the merely gossiping. If there is to be found, also, an extremely bitter-sweet appendix on M. de Pontmartin, and an article on Chateaubriand, which is a superfluity and a blunder after the great book, we can pardon them. No other man has ever done such another year’s _darg_ in criticism.