The Eighth, with many excellent examples of the usual seventeenth-eighteenth century _causeries_, and with a most welcome batch of mediæval studies on Joinville, on the _Roman de Renart_, on the _Histoire Littéraire_—good to read even now, and priceless then—contains an article, written with great care, to which an Englishman naturally turns, and with which most Englishmen will be disappointed, that on Gibbon. None of the usual causes could have blunted Sainte-Beuve’s judgment here: yet it is blunted. Missing, in the one sense, what he calls the _javelot_, the _coup de foudre_, the _cri haletant_—in other words, the somewhat theatrical and rhetorical[602] touch of French, he misses also, in the other, Gibbon’s _magnificence_, that sense of the vast procession of events and that power of reproducing it, which gives an almost poetic self-transcendence to an otherwise prosaic and _philosophe_ nature. We all miss things, of course: but such a man as Sainte-Beuve should not have missed such a thing as this. The “Joinville,” however, which immediately follows, makes once more those familiar amends; and the next volume (the Ninth) contains admirable companions to it in the “Froissart” and the “Villehardouin,” this last one of the author’s best. He had now started (to some though not to all extents with advantage) dealing with one subject in several essays: and most of this volume is so occupied. “Stendhal,” “Marivaux,” “Madame Dacier,” with others, show his admirable flexibility. The Tenth is perhaps less attractive, for except Agrippa d’Aubigné and one or two others, its subjects are not as a rule of the first interest, and in one Sainte-Beuve returns to Chateaubriand—not happily. But the Eleventh, with a certain amount of “filling,”—the first collection stopped here, and Sainte-Beuve had to plug the gap made by the removal of the index when it was extended,—has at least two articles, or batches of articles, of the first interest—those on Montluc and Cowper. _Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut_—to appreciate equally, and almost at the same moment, the greater d’Artagnan of Sienna and the patron of Puss.