In common with nearly all cultivated Frenchmen, Renan was a reverential admirer of George Sand. This remarkable woman had been able to extend her dominion over the younger generation of France, without being in the least untrue to her youthful ideals. An idealist like Renan, she had won through her idealism; a naturalist like Taine, through the mysterious endowments that testified of her nearness to nature; the younger Dumas, to whom we might believe the heroes and heroines of George Sand, concerning whom his dramas often make bitter criticisms, would be especially odious, was perhaps the one among the post-romantic authors who stood personally nearest to her. The enthusiasm of Dumas for George Sand was, upon the whole, only a consequence of his literary susceptibility; the enthusiasm of Renan was of a deeper character. As strong as must necessarily be his hatred for Béranger, in whom he sees the personification of all that is frivolous and prosaic in the French national character, and whose narrow "_Dieu des bonnes gens_" is a thorn in the eye of the follower of Herder, the pantheistic thinker and dreamer, quite as lively must naturally be his sympathy for the authoress of "Lélia," "Spiridion," and so many other dreamily enthusiastic writings. Notwithstanding his wide range of vision, Renan is not without national limitations in his literary sympathies. In a conversation about England, he had nothing whatever that was good to say of Dickens; he was not even inclined to be fair. "The pretentious style of Dickens," said he, "makes the same impression on me as the style of a provincial newspaper." His well-known unjust article on Feuerbach fills us with less astonishment, when we learn in how marked a degree the defects of Dickens caused him to overlook the merits. It is the same morbidly developed taste for a classic and well-tempered mode of expression which gives Renan an antipathy to the humorous peculiarities in the style of Dickens and to the passionate form of Feuerbach's style; the genial mannerism of the English seemed to him provincial; the violence of the German appeared to him to savor of a tobacco-like after-taste of the pedantry of German-student atheism. II