Amaury, the hero of the book, is on intimate terms with three women. One, who is the wife of his teacher and chief, he loves more than he ventures to let her understand; the second, to whom he is betrothed, he gives up for the sake of the first; and yet at the very same time he allows himself to drift into an intimate friendship with the third, whom he alternately adores passionately, and pains by his cruel indifference--a friendship which neither satisfies him, nor saves him from indulging in the lowest debauchery. Intelligent, ambitious, and obstinately industrious as Amaury is, his intellectual vigour is gradually paralysed by all these entanglements, and he at last feels that there is no hope for him except in submission to the severest discipline of the Roman Catholic Church. His account of his life as a young man is given in the form of the confession of an ecclesiastic, and the unction of parts of it is insufferable; the outbursts of remorse, the moral and religious admonitions, the prayers and homilies, which interrupt the flow of the tale, are tiresome; but the reader is sufficiently compensated for them. Two things make the book a remarkable one--in the first place, the perfect understanding which it displays of the development process and the diseases of the soul, an understanding which speaks of persistent self-examination, and foreshadows the coming critic; in the second place, the insight into feminine character, which reveals the feminine element in Sainte-Beuve's own nature, and prognosticates his unique success in the critical interpretation of the personalities of notable women. I append a few specimens of his keen observation and impressive reflections:--"How ungrateful youth is by nature! It throws away with a contemptuous gesture everything that has not been given to it by itself. It will only be bound by ties which it has formed itself, demands friends of its own choice, for itself alone, being certain that in its soul are treasures sufficient to buy hearts with, and life sufficient to fructify them. Hence we see it bestow itself for life on friends whom it did not know yesterday, and swear eternal devotion to women who are almost strangers." "How contemptible human friendships are! How they exclude one another! How they follow one another and drive one another away like waves! Alas! this house to which you repair every morning and every evening, which seems like your home and better than your home, and for which you neglect everything that hitherto has been sweet to you, this house, you may be quite certain, will some day lose favour in your eyes; you will avoid it as a fatal place, and if by chance your business leads you into its neighbourhood, you will take a long round to avoid seeing it. The cleverer you are, the stronger will be the feeling." Every one of a truthful disposition who has been under the painful necessity of concealing his or her real feeling, will