We must not follow the rest of the twenty years or thereabouts with equal precision, though few of them were less substantially filled. An indication to those who do not know, a reminder to those who do, of certain _sommités_ among the articles; and a small sheaf of specially important passages, may lead us to the final summary of Sainte-Beuve’s critical position and achievement. A whole cluster of remarkable things opens the Third volume. The “Rabelais” is practically the first piece of absolutely sane and appreciative criticism on the subject, the starting-point and foundation of what is now the accepted opinion of the competent. The “_Qu’est ce qu’un classique?_” is one of those more general pieces of criticism in which Sainte-Beuve does not go out of his way to indulge, but which he does, when he does them, in a manner showing the superiority which practice in actual “judging of authors” confers on its practitioners when they “go up higher.” The “Rousseau” is almost equal to the “Rabelais,” and it is not the first comer in criticism who can be just to both. His social-historic studies of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century serve as foils, and as intrinsically delightful reading, though they are often on the fringes of literature itself. The article on Latouche is a little ungenerous, and that on Fontenelle more than a little inadequate; while I wish that Sainte-Beuve had not indulged in a singularly vain and violent contrast between Camille Desmoulins and Vauvenargues. But the “Pasquier,” the “Saint-Simon,” the new “Diderot,” make amends. [Sidenote: _His occasional polemic._] And it is always so. There were squalls occasionally, as there were especially certain to be, at the ticklish time, when the Second Consulate or Presidency was passing, not quite ideally, into the Second Empire. He need not have poured broadsides into popgunners like the Staël-Hetzels and the Laurent-Pichats.[601] The first was a very useful publisher and a respectable author of children’s books; I think I remember some tolerable critical work of the second, apart from his politics. But what is either to-day? what, much more, will either be a hundred years hence, beside Sainte-Beuve? He knew Wordsworth: surely he might have remembered that “our noisy _curs_ are” not even “moments in the being of the Eternal Silence.” “They yap; what yap they? let them yap.” For in some cases they can do nothing else: and in all the Silence itself catches them very soon, if we do not lend them an echo.