There is room for more difference of competent opinion as to his abstinence from the most definite posing and placing—from the final arrangement of his portraits exactly as he wished to have them seen by his readers, and to stand in relation to each other. There is, of course, its own merit in that abstinence, which is (as it was in the earlier case of Villemain) something of a reaction from the fondness of his “Empire” predecessors for the trenchant, the peremptory, the official distinction and ticket. There had been very much too much of this during the Neo-classic period; and there has been, to put it mildly, quite enough and to spare of it since. Nevertheless, one may think that Sainte-Beuve, though he never, as his countrymen too often do, leaves you uninformed, does too often leave you floating—undecided even as to what his own definite view of the man’s or work’s value, relation, position, may be. Now this surely is a slight defect. When one wants a picture, one does not want merely a sheet of drawing-paper, with the most accurate and “genial” studies of eye, nose, chin, mouth, hair, scattered anyhow about it, but the complete, or at any rate the outlined, face made up from these studies. I can think of no general fault save these two, and we are not now to hark back to particulars. The tale of general and particular excellences is more agreeable to construct, but more difficult to put in little. The head and front of Sainte-Beuve’s critical welldoing he has himself put excellently and more than once. To read; to understand; to love:—and then to facilitate reading, understanding, and loving on the part of others—these are the first and second great commandments of the critic. And few, surely, have obeyed them better. He may be a little cumbered about much serving—we do not (that is those of us who want criticism) always want such Persic apparatus of biography and history and gossip. But the Persic apparatus is very agreeable in itself, and sometimes even not useless. And there is plenty of the plain leg of critical mutton— well fed, well killed, well kept, and well dressed. Only perhaps a certain degree of expertness can fully appreciate, but ordinary sense and taste must surely not fail to perceive, the range of reading which is—be it again and again repeated—in all but the most extraordinary cases the _necessarium_, if not the _unum necessarium_, of the critic. Common-sense and taste are perhaps at least equally well prepared with the expertest _expertise_ to recognise, if they are given their way, the sanity and the equity, the patience and the thoroughness, the freedom from crotchet and caprice, from the merely parochial and the merely particularist, which distinguish Sainte-Beuve from almost all other critics. He was, as we have seen, very lucky; few have had at once his gifts, and his opportunities of exercising them, and that rarest and happiest gift of “the Hour,” without which Gift, and even in some sense