but for me, as I look at the long row of volumes which hold the interpretation of French literature, I am almost overwhelmed at the magnitude of this man's achievement. Nor is it to be supposed that Sainte-Beuve, because he was primarily a critic, drew his knowledge of life from books only, and wrote, as it were, at second hand. The very contrary is true. As a younger man, he had mixed much with society, and even in his later years, when, as he says, he lived at the bottom of a well, he still, through his friendship with the Princesse Mathilde and others of the great world, kept in close touch with the active forces of the Empire. As a matter of fact, every one knows, who has read at all in his essays, that he was first of all a psychologist, and that his knowledge of the human breast was quite as sure as his acquaintance with libraries. He might almost be accused of slighting the written word in order to get at the secret of the writer. What attracted him chiefly was that middle ground where life and literature meet, where life becomes self-conscious through expression, and literature retains the reality of association with facts. "A little poesy," he thought, "separates us from history and the reality of things; much of poesy brings us back." Literature to him was one of the arts of society. Hence he was never more at his ease, his touch was never surer and his eloquence more communicable, than when he was dealing with the great ladies who guided the society of the eighteenth century and retold its events in their letters and memoirs,--Mme. du Deffand, Mme. de Grafigny, Mlle. de Lespinasse, and those who preceded and followed. Nowhere does one get closer to the critic's own disappointment than when he says with a sigh, thinking of those irrecoverable days: "Happy time! all of life then was turned to sociability." And he was describing his own method as a critic, no less than the character of Mlle. de Lespinasse, when he wrote: "Her great art in society, one of the secrets of her success, was to feel the intelligence _(l'esprit)_ of others, to make it prevail, and to seem to forget her own. Her conversation was never either above or below those with whom she spoke; she possessed measure, proportion, rightness of mind. She reflected so well the impressions of others, and received so visibly the influence of their intelligence, that they loved her for the success she helped them to attain. She raised this disposition to an art. 'Ah!' she cried one day, 'how I long to know the foible of every one!'" And this love of the social side of literature, this hankering after _la bella scuola_ when men wrote under the sway of some central governance, explains Sainte-Beuve's feeling of desolation amidst the scattered, individualistic tendencies of his own day.