from an objective but highly-idealizing point of view, best expressed by saying that he had a hero-worship for himself: his memoirs and other autobiographical writings are full of it, and in his intercourse it perpetually overflowed. "That is the brow they have tried to bend to the dust!" he exclaimed, standing before his own likeness in Ary Scheffer's studio. Lord Houghton, among his many good stories, had one of spending an evening at Lamartine's in Paris with a circle of celebrities. Alfred de Vigny, who had been out of town, presented himself. "Welcome back!" said Lamartine magnificently. "You come from the provinces: do they admire us down there?"--"They adore you," replied De Vigny with a bow. The conversation was a prolonged paean to the host, with choral strophe and antistrophe. One of the party began to rehearse the aspects in which Lamartine was the greatest man in France--"As a poet, as an orator, as an historian, as a statesman;" and as he paused, "And as a _soldier_," added Lamartine with a sublime gesture, "if ever France shall need him." This may have been the country neighbor who, we learn from Sainte-Beuve, pronounced Lamartine to be Fenelon without his didacticism, Rousseau without his sophistry, Mirabeau without his incendiary notions. Still, there were asides in the dialogue. One evening, the week before the overthrow of the provisional government of which Lamartine was president, he had a crowded reception, and, notwithstanding the failure and imminent downfall of his administration, he was radiant with satisfaction. "What can M. de Lamartine have to be so pleased about?" said one of his friends to another. "He is pleased with himself," was the reply.--"One of those speeches," observes Sainte-Beuve, "which only friends find to make." But Lamartine was by no means solitary in this infatuation. Sainte-Beuve remarks that "Nothing is so common in our days: some think themselves God, some the Son of God, some archangels. Pierre Leroux thinks himself the first, De Vigny the last: Lamartine is a good prince--he is satisfied to be a seraph."