When there were enough of these quantities and qualities flowering into the definite and the absolute for him to feed on, feed if not to satiety at least to the largest loosening of his intellectual belt, there were so many that we may even fall in with most of M. Faguet’s discriminations and reserves about him and yet find his edifice rest on proportioned foundations. For it is his assimilation of things and things, of his store of them and of the right ones, the right for representation, that leaves his general image, even with great chunks of surface surgically, that is critically, removed, still coherent and erect. There are moments when M. Faguet—most surgical he!—seems to threaten to remove so much that we ask ourselves in wonder what may be left; but no removal matters while the principle of observation animating the mass is left unattacked. Our present critic for instance is “down”—very understandingly down as seems to us—on some of the sides of his author’s rich temperamental vulgarity; which is accompanied on those sides by want of taste, want of wit, want of style, want of knowledge of ever so many parts of the general subject, too precipitately proposed, and want of fineness of feeling about ever so many others. We agree with him freely enough, subject always to this reserve already glanced at, that a novelist of a high esthetic sensibility must always find more in any other novelist worth considering seriously at all than he can perhaps hope to impart even to the most intelligent of critics pure and simple his subtle reasons for. This said, we lose ourselves, to admiration, in such a matter for example as the tight hug of the mere material, the supremely important if such ever was, represented by the appeal to us on behalf of the money-matters of César Birotteau.