It was not till the last stage of his career that Sainte-Beuve's talent attained to its full development. The chances are that an uncritical author will deteriorate as he grows older, but that a critic will improve; Sainte-Beuve improved year by year, to the very end of his life. The absolute truthfulness, which was naturally as marked a feature of his character as his industry, but which had often been held in check by one consideration or another, allowed itself ever freer play; and the capacity for work remained as great as in his youth. Sainte-Beuve's writings fill fifty volumes, and in all these volumes there is not a careless line, and inaccuracies are of the rarest occurrence. But it was not until the last stage of his career that he was courageous enough to give perfectly free expression to his real opinions on religious and philosophical subjects. He now eased his mind of everything that he had repressed since the youthful days when he studied the philosophers of the eighteenth century. His want of appreciation of Balzac and Beyle, the one a man of a much coarser, the other of a much more eccentric nature than his own, must not render us oblivious of the courage and determination with which he championed the rising generation of French authors, even such writers as Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, whom he did not altogether understand. Nor ought it to be forgotten that he refused to write an article on Napoleon's _Vie de César_, and that in the Senate he distinguished himself as the solitary but determined opponent of clericalism. In March 1867 he defended Renan and his _Vie de Jésus_. In June of the same year, when it was proposed (apropos of a complaint from the magnates of the town of Saint-Etienne) to exclude from the public libraries accessible to the people all literature objectionable to the clergy, including the works of Voltaire, Rabelais, &c, he was the solitary member of the servile, priest-ridden Senate who boldly championed intellectual liberty and warmly defended the honour of French literature. The students, who in 1855 had hissed him as an Imperialist, now honoured him with a deputation and a banquet. The lying rumours spread by the clerical press on the subject of a small dinner-party which he inadvertently happened to give on Good Friday, 1868, represented him in the light of an antichrist, of a reincarnated Voltaire; and when in May 1869 he made a last effort, and with a weak voice but stout heart spoke in the Senate in defence of liberty of the press and against the Catholic Universities Bill, his name became a war-cry, became the symbol of free thought. In January 1869 he renounced his allegiance to Imperialism. In October of the same year he died, after five years of illness and a long period of terrible suffering, borne with stoic fortitude.