It is odd that the reviewer, while hunting for objections to Lemaître’s criticism, as criticism, should have “missed” the really valid one—that it is often not so much critical as “high fantastical.” Lemaître was apt to be carried away by his imagination, and to run through a varied assortment of comparisons, associations, and parallels that coloured rather than cleared the issue. The rigorist Croce has, in passing, laid his finger upon this. He quotes Lemaître on Corneille. Polyeucte, says the critic, recalls at once “St. Paul, Huss, Calvin, and Prince Kropotkine,” and awakes “the same curiosity as a Russian Nihilist, of the kind to be seen in Paris in bygone years, in some _brasserie_ ... of whom the whisper went round that at St. Petersburg he had killed a general or a prefect of police.” Croce dismisses this sort of thing as _ricami di fantasia_, and certainly, from the point of view of strict criticism, it is a weakness of Lemaître’s. After all, however (as the counsel in “Pickwick” pleaded about something else), it is an amiable weakness; it makes him such incomparably good reading! Heaven forbid that I should reopen the old stupid, stale controversy about “impressionist” and “judicial” criticism; but it is obvious that the one sort does explicitly acknowledge and glory in what is implicit in the other—the individual temperament and talent of the critic himself. If the “impressionist” who gives free play to his temperament is apt sometimes to get out of bounds—to be substituting _ricami di fantasia_ for strict analysis—he may be all the more stimulating to the reader. He may be giving the reader not scrupulous criticism, but something better. It all depends, of course, on the temperament and the talent. Lemaître’s _ricami di fantasia_ are part, if not the best part, of his charm. JANE AUSTEN