“I find no fault with the sentimentalists,” answered the severe critic, “but that of exceeding feebleness. They have no bone and muscle in their genius--all is flaccid and rotund in its feminine symmetry. They seem to think that vigour consists in florid phrases and little aphorisms, and delineate all the mighty tempests of the human heart with the polished prettiness of a miniature-painter on ivory. No!--these two are children of another kind--affected, tricked-out, well-dressed children--very clever, very precocious--but children still. Their whinings, and their sentimentalities, and their egotism, and their vanity, cannot interest masculine beings who know what life and its stern objects are.” “Your brother-in-law,” said Maltravers with a slight smile, “must find in you a discouraging censor.” “My poor Castruccio,” replied De Montaigne, with a half-sigh; “he is one of those victims whom I believe to be more common than we dream of--men whose aspirations are above their powers. I agree with a great German writer, that in the first walks of Art no man has a right to enter, unless he is convinced that he has strength and speed for the goal. Castruccio might be an amiable member of society, nay, an able and useful man, if he would apply the powers he possesses to the rewards they may obtain. He has talent enough to win him reputation in any profession but that of a poet.” “But authors who obtain immortality are not always first-rate.” “First-rate in their way, I suspect; even if that way be false or trivial. They must be connected with the _history_ of their literature; you must be able to say of them, ‘In this school, be it bad or good, they exerted such and such an influence;’ in a word, they must form a link in the great chain of a nation’s authors, which may be afterwards forgotten by the superficial, but without which the chain would be incomplete. And thus, if not first-rate for all time, they have been first-rate in their own day. But Castruccio is only the echo of others--he can neither found a school nor ruin one. Yet this” (again added De Montaigne after a pause)--“this melancholy malady in my brother-in-law would cure itself, perhaps, if he were not Italian. In your animated and bustling country, after sufficient disappointment as a poet, he would glide into some other calling, and his vanity and craving for effect would find a rational and manly outlet. But in Italy, what can a clever man do, if he is not a poet or a robber? If he love his country, that crime is enough to unfit him for civil employment, and his mind cannot stir a step in the bold channels of speculation without falling foul of the Austrian or the Pope. No; the best I can hope for Castruccio is, that he will end in an antiquary, and dispute about ruins with the Romans. Better that than mediocre poetry.”