We hope these two volumes may be widely read, as they deserve to be, and that they may set their readers thinking what it is that makes Sainte-Beuve so famous a critic and so delightful a writer. His volumes are very numerous. 'All Balzac's novels occupy a shelf,' says Browning's Bishop; Sainte-Beuve's criticisms take up quite as much room. The _Causeries du Lundi_ and the _Nouveaux Lundis_ fill some twenty-eight tomes. _À priori_, one would be disposed to mutter, 'This is too much.' Can any man turned fifty truthfully declare that he wishes De Quincey had left thirty volumes behind him instead of fifteen? Great is De Quincey, but so elaborate are his movements, so tremendous his literary contortions, that when you have done with him you feel it would be cruelty to keep him stretched upon the rack of his own style for a moment longer. Sainte-Beuve is as easy as may be. Never before or since has there been an author so well content with his subject, whatever it might chance to be; so willing to be bound within its confines, and not to travel beyond it. In this excellent 'stay-at-home' quality, he reminds the English reader more of Addison than of any of our later critics and essayists. These latter are too anxious to please, far too disposed to believe that, apart from themselves and their flashing wits, their readers can have no possible interest in the subject they have in hand. They are ever seeking to adorn their theme instead of exploring it. They are always prancing, seldom willing to take a brisk constitutional along an honest, turnpike road. Even so admirable, so sensible a writer as Mr. Lowell is apt to worry us with his Elizabethan profusion of imagery, epithet, and wit. 'Something too much of this,' we cry out before we are half-way through. William Hazlitt, again, is really too witty. It is uncanny. Sainte-Beuve never teases his readers this way. You often catch yourself wondering, so matter-of-fact is his narrative, why it is you are interested. The dates of the births and deaths of his authors, the facts as to their parentage and education, are placed before you with stern simplicity, and without a single one of those quips and cranks which Carlyle ('God rest his soul!--he was a merry man') scattered with full hands over his explosive pages. But yet if you are interested, as for the most part you are, what a triumph for sobriety and good sense! A noisy author is as bad as a barrel-organ; a quiet one is as refreshing as a long pause in a foolish sermon.