spirituality the other creeds missed, and which based itself frankly on the total depravity of mankind. He was too much a child of the age to breathe in that thin air, and fell back on all that remained to him,--inquisitive doubt and a scientific demand for positive truth. It is the history of the century. And in literature I find the same inconstancy on the surface, while at heart he suffered little change. Only here his experience ran counter to the times, and most of the opprobrium that has been cast on him is due to the fact that he never allowed the clamour of popular taste and the warmth of his sympathy with present modes to drown that inner critical voice of doubt. As a standard-bearer of Victor Hugo and the romanticists he still maintained his reserves, and, on the other hand, long after he had turned renegade from that camp he still spoke of himself as only _demi-converti_. The proportion changed with his development, but from beginning to end he was at bottom classical in his love of clarity and self-restraint, while intensely interested in the life and aspirations of his own day. There is in one of the recently published letters to Victor Hugo a noteworthy illustration of this steadfastness. It was, in fact, the second letter he wrote to the poet, and goes back to 1827, the year of _Cromwell_. On the twelfth of February, Hugo read his new tragi-comedy aloud, and Sainte-Beuve was evidently warm in expressions of praise. But in the seclusion of his own room the critical instinct reawoke in him, and he wrote the next day a long letter to the dramatist, not retracting what he had said, but adding certain reservations and insinuating certain admonitions. "Toutes ces critiques rentrent dans une seule que je m'étais déjà permis d'adresser à votre talent, l'excès, l'abus de la _force_, et passez-moi le mot, la _charge_." Is not the whole of his critical attitude toward the men of his age practically contained in this rebuke of excess, and over-emphasis, and self-indulgence? And Sainte-Beuve when he wrote the words was just twenty-three, was in the first ardour of his attachment to the giant--the Cyclops, he seemed to Sainte-Beuve later--of the century.