In the Fourth volume, though the “Mirabeau” articles and the “Chamfort,” the “Saint-Evremond et Ninon” and the “Marmontel” are charming in the mixed kind, I think, for literature, the palm is due to that sentence—so autobiographical and so much more than merely autobiographical—which opens the “Moreau and Dupont” piece, “Je cause rarement ici de poésie, precisément parceque je l’ai beaucoup aimée et que je l’aime encore plus que toute chose.” _Quia multum amavi!_ And he does not derogate from this attitude in the Fifth, where he welcomes Victor de Laprade and Leconte de Lisle, while this also contains delightful things on Raynouard, Rivarol, Retz, Patru, Gourville, and even the remarkable person once called Le-Brun-_Pindare_. In the Sixth we go from Rollin to La Reine Margot, from Bernardin and Courier to Saint Anselm backwards and the Abbé Gerbet forwards, with, at the close, one article of special interest here, Sainte-Beuve’s revised and in some ways _palinodic_ opinions on Boileau. The Seventh is mainly eighteenth century— Montesquieu and the Président de Brosses, Franklin and Barthélemy, Grimm (for whom, here as elsewhere, Sainte-Beuve makes strong fight against the general, and, I am bound to say, in my judgment, the well-grounded, distrust of him), Necker and Volney, with, to give us change from a better time, Regnard and La Fontaine at front and close, Richelieu and Saint François de Sales, Mérimée and Arnault, and the elder Marguerite. On the last he is a little disappointing: and perhaps we might have expected that he would be.