None is a competent judge, in living literature, of other than works written in his own tongue. It is in vain that you believe yourself thoroughly acquainted with a foreign idiom: you lack the nurse's milk, together with the first words which she teaches you at her breast and in your swaddling-clothes; certain accents belong to the mother country alone. The English and Germans have the strangest notions concerning our men of letters: they worship what we despise, and despise what we worship; they do not understand Racine nor La Fontaine, nor even Molière completely. It is ludicrous to know who are considered our great writers in London, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, Munich, Leipzig, Göttingen, Cologne, to know what is read there with avidity and what not at all. When an author's merit lies especially in his diction, no foreigner will ever understand that merit. The more intimate, individual, rational a talent is, the more do its mysteries escape the mind which is not, so to speak, that talent's fellow-countryman. We admire the Greeks and Romans on trust; our admiration comes to us by tradition, and the Greeks and Romans are not there to laugh at our barbarian judgments. Which of us has an idea of the harmony of the prose of Demosthenes and Cicero, of the cadence of the verses of Alcæus and Horace, as they were caught by a Greek or Latin ear? Men maintain that real beauties are of all times, all countries: yes, beauties of feeling and of thought; not beauties of style. Style is not cosmopolitan like thought: it has a native land, a sky, a sun of its own. Burns, Mason[302], Cowper died during my emigration, before 1800 and in 1800: they ended the century; I commenced it. Darwin[303] and Beattie[304] died two years after my return from exile. [Sidenote: James Beattie.]