Such was the office which Sainte-Beuve sought to fulfil in the France of his own day. That conscious principle of restraint might, he thought, when applied to his own poetical work, introduce into French literature a style like that of Cowper's or Wordsworth's in England; and to a certain extent he was successful in this attempt. But in the end he found the Democritean maxim too strong for him: _Excludit sanos Helicone poetas_; and, indeed, the difference between the poet and the critic may scarcely be better defined than in this, that in the former the principle of restraint works unconsciously and from without, whereas in the latter it proceeds consciously and from within. And finding himself debarred from Helicon (not by impotence, as some would say, but by excess of self-knowledge), he deliberately undertook to introduce a little more sanity into the notions of his contemporaries. I have shown how at the very beginning of his career he took upon himself privately such a task with Hugo. It might almost be said that the history of his intellect is summed up in his growth toward the sane and the simple; that, like Goethe, from whom so much of his critical method derives, his life was a long endeavour to supplant the romantic elements of his taste by the classical. What else is the meaning of his attack on the excesses of Balzac? or his defence of Erasmus (_le droit, je ne dis des tièdes, mais des neutres_), and of all those others who sought for themselves a governance in the law of proportion? In one of his latest volumes he took the occasion of Taine's _History of English Literature_ to speak out strongly for the admirable qualities of Pope: