We may next take, to some extent together, two writers of the novel who made their reputation in the July Monarchy, though one of them long outlived it; who, though this one inclined to a sort of domestic tragedy and the other to pure comedy, resembled each other not a little in clinging to ordinary life, and my estimate of whom is considerably higher than that recently (or, I think, at present) entertained by French critics or by those English critics who think it right to be guided by their French _confreres_. This estimate, however, has been given at length in another place,[265] and I quite admit that the subjects, though I have not in the least lowered my opinion of them, can hardly be said (like Gautier, Merimee, Balzac, and Dumas, in the present part of this volume, or others later) to demand, in a general History, very large space in dealing with them. I shall therefore endeavour to summarise my corrected impressions more briefly than in those other cases. This shortening may, I think, be justified doubly: in the first place, because any one who is enough of a student to want more can go to the other handling; and, in the second, because the only excellent way, of reading the books themselves, may be adopted with very unusual absence of any danger of disappointment. I hardly know any work of either Jules Sandeau or of Charles de Bernard which is not worth reading by persons of fairly catholic tastes in novel pastime. The first-named--the younger by some half-dozen years, but the first to publish by more than as many--concerns those who take a merely or mainly anecdotic interest in literature by his well-known _liaison_ with George Sand--to whom he gave _dimidium nominis_, and perhaps for a time at least _dimidium cordis_, though he probably did not get it back so much "in a worse estate"[266] as was the case with Musset and Chopin. Sandeau's collaboration with her in novel-writing was long afterwards succeeded by another in dramaturgy with Emile Augier, which resulted in at least one of the most famous French plays of the nineteenth century, _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, based on Sandeau's _Sacs et Parchemins_. But we need busy ourselves only with the novels themselves. [Sidenote: Sandeau's work.]