steady equilibrium among his fine powers.  Considering the bulk and vast variety and general excellence of his critical work, is it too much to say of him, that he is not only, as he has been called, the foremost of living critics, but that he deserves to hold the first place among all critics?  No other has done so much so well.  Goethe and Coleridge are something more; they are critics incidentally; but M. Sainte-Beuve, with poetical and philosophical qualities that lift him to a high vantage-ground, has made criticism his life-work, and through conscientious and symmetrical use of these qualities has done his work well.  Besides much else in his many and many-sided volumes, there is to be read in them a full, spirited history of French literature.

Our attempt to make M. Sainte-Beuve better known on this side the Atlantic we cannot more fitly conclude than with a sketch of him—­a literary sketch—­by himself.  This we find in the fifth volume of the “Nouveaux Lundis,” in a paper on Moliere, published in July, 1863.  A man who, in the autumnal ripeness of his powers, thus frankly tells us his likes and dislikes, tells us what he is.  While by reflected action the passage becomes a self-portraiture, it is a sample of finest criticism.

“To make Moliere loved by more people is in my judgment to do a public service.

“Indeed, to love Moliere—­I mean to love him sincerely and with all one’s heart—­it is, do you know? to have within one’s self a guarantee against many defects, much wrong-headedness.  It is, in the first place, to dislike what is incompatible with Moliere, all that was counter to him in his day, and that would have been insupportable to him in ours.

“To love Moliere is to be forever cured—­do not say of base and infamous hypocrisy, but of fanaticism, of intolerance, and of that kind of hardness which makes one anathematize and curse; it is to carry a corrective to admiration even of Bossuet, and for all who, after his example, exult, were it only in words, over their enemy dead or dying; who usurp I know not what holy speech, and involuntarily believe themselves to be, with the thunderbolt in their hand, in the region and place of the Most High.  Men eloquent and sublime, you are far too much so for me!

“To love Moliere, is to be sheltered against, and a thousand leagues away from, that other fanaticism, the political, which is cold, dry, cruel, which never laughs, which smells of the sectary, which, under pretext of Puritanism, finds means to mix and knead all that is bitter, and to combine in one sour doctrine the hates, the spites, and the Jacobinism of all times.  It is to be not less removed, on the other hand, from those tame, dull souls who, in the very presence of evil, cannot be roused to either indignation or hatred.

“To love Moliere, is to be secured against giving in to that pious and boundless admiration for a humanity which worships itself, and which forgets of what stuff it is made, and that, do what it will, it is always poor human nature.  It is, not to despise it too much, however, this common humanity, at which one laughs, of which one is, and into which we throw ourselves through a healthful hilarity whenever we are with Moliere.