Finally in 1865, he tells the good Abbé Barbe, who had sent him a copy of his treatise on the immortality of the soul, that he has given up the combat. He says:

"I understand, I listen, I reply feebly rather by doubts than by firm arguments; but, after all, I have never been able to form on this grave subject a faith, a belief, a conviction which abides and does not waver and totter a moment after I have formed it."

When he died like a Stoic, four years later, Sainte-Beuve was according to his express wish buried without any religious ceremony.

The impression of bitterness, lassitude and ennui, which one received from almost every letter in the first two volumes of SainteBeuve's correspondence is confirmed by the new collection of letters. Ennui begins to show itself in his very earliest letters, and becomes deeper and deeper as his years passed by and his life became more and more isolated.

"There comes," he says in one of his letters, "a sad moment in life when we feel that we have attained all that we can reasonably hope to attain; that we have acquired everything to which we may reasonably aspire. I am in that position. I have obtained much more than my destiny at first offered, and I feel at the same time that this much is very little. The future promises me nothing; I expect nothing from ambition, nothing from happiness."

Elsewhere he says:

"In youth a world dwells within us; but as we advance in life it comes about that our own thoughts and sentiments can no longer fill our solitude, or at least can no longer charm it. . . . at a certain age in life if your house is not peopled with children it becomes the abode of crazes and vices."

What were the crazes and vices which filled Sainte-Beuve's house may be seen in M. Pons's unsavoury volume, 'Sainte-Beuve et ses inconnues.'

In spite of his bitterness and moral crookedness, Sainte-Beuve must not be judged too severely. His moral crookedness was due to exceptional physical causes, and it was rather external than due to actual ugliness of soul. To our mind, Sainte-Beuve, as we see him both in his letters and in his political and critical writings, is a singular example of the power which a man of strong will has to divide his existence, and to keep each phase of it distinct. To say that Sainte-Beuve's head was always more active than his heart is true in this sense: his intellect was never unconscious of the impulses of his heart, whether they were bad or good. His one passion in life was literature, and his one ambition was to play an important literary rôle. His efforts were successful, but at the price of what perse

vering and uninterrupted labour ! a literary friend:

At the age of sixty he writes to

"I confess to you, between ourselves, that I am a little angry, not with the public, of whose treatment of me in general I have nothing to complain, but with society, such as it exists at present; and to think that a man who has been working and printing for forty years (that is the exact figure) should see himself condemned to continue indefinitely without anybody being aware that each week he accomplishes a tour de force, and that while he is often the first to be amused at it, he nevertheless runs the risk of breaking a muscle one fine day or another. Physique is everything, even in the matter of intellect, and every week my physique is horribly strained. Every Tuesday morning I go down into a well, and I do not come up again until Friday evening at I know not what o'clock. ... I never set foot in the Academy, for want of time. When invited to dinner by a distinguished Englishman, a member of Parliament, I replied to him that it was impossible, vu que je n'étais pas un monsieur, ni un gentleman, mais un ouvrier à la pièce et à l'heure."

This letter seems to us to explain the whole character of his life. By constant and enthusiastic literary labour his intellect was developed to a marvellous degree of lucidity and activity; various circumstances, and not least among them his physical ugliness, led, as he says, to his stifling his passion; nature had given him very strong animal passions, and he indulged them knowingly and philosophically as he has related in an apologue concerning la Jeune Clady, in the first volume of his Correspondance.' Sainte-Beuve could not, like Sophocles in his old age, congratulate himself on having got rid of a "raging and furious master" (Uttŵvтa kai äypiov deσπóτηv); but his mind was no more affected by his passions than was the mind of Sophocles. As for his heart, we have seen that it had capacities of tenderness. May we not say that the higher the intellect, the higher the sentimental emotions?

Nothing could have been more tender and exquisite than his affection for men like Ernest Renan, Taine, Paul de Saint-Victor, Scherer, and for the younger school of novelists and poets, such as Flaubert, the brothers de Goncourt, Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier. His was a friendship of the highest and noblest kind. It is no reproach that he did not lavish it right and left.

When Jules Janin succeeded Sainte-Beuve at the Academy he rendered full justice to Sainte-Beuve the critic in his brilliant receptionspeech. He spoke of his marvellous sagacity, his profound intuition, his subtle finesse, his patience in investigation, and of that gift of understanding everything, of penetrating everything, of feeling everything, of entering into the most opposite natures, of living their life, of thinking their thoughts, of descending to the bottom of the very innermost folds of their being, with a golden lamp in his hand, and

of passing like the Hindoo gods through a perpetual series of incarnations and avatars. He admired that ever-wakeful curiosity, never satisfied as long as the very slightest detail escaped it. But SainteBeuve, if he could have heard his own éloge, would perhaps have found that while exalting the critic, Janin had glided too rapidly over the poet.

Sainte-Beuve was a many-sided man, and many who have recently spoken of him have been unjust to his memory for the simple reason that they have examined only one or two sides of his life. In his correspondence for instance, and in the volumes of scandal and gossip, the melancholy and sensual aspects of the critic were most prominent. No one dares to contest his literary glory, it is true; but very few ever speak of his poems, into which he has thrown so much of his better self; and yet, as Théophile Gautier tells us, Sainte-Beuve almost regretted that his critical reputation had eclipsed his reputation as a poet.

"Le poëte mort jeune à qui l'homme survit,"

existed in him young and living up to the last, and it was with visible pleasure, says Gautier, that he used to recite to his intimate friends a fragment of some mysterious elegy, some sonnet of languor and of fove which had found no place in his three collections of poems. A word about Joseph Delorme,' and above all about the 'Pensées d'Août,' caused him more joy than a long panegyric of his last causerie de Lundi. Indeed, as a poet, Sainte-Beuve had been an inventor. He had struck a new and thoroughly modern note, and in his humble poetry, which by the sincerity of the sentiment and by its minute observation of nature reminds us of the verses of Wordsworth or of Cowper, he had traced out for himself modest and flowery paths where no one in France had ever trodden before him.

The Freres.

BY MRS. ALEXANDER, AUTHOR OF 'THE Woning O't.'

CHAPTER I.

It was a few days before Easter, and a solemn dinner had been celebrated in the new residence of Richard Frere, Esq., H Square, Hyde Park.

Only two of the various carriages which had awaited their owners remained. The red-waistcoated, red-nosed veteran who stood by the strip of carpet leading from the entrance to the kerb, to convey the orders of "Jeames" and the auxiliary forces to the coachmen, was counting the amount of small silver already received, by the bright gas in the fanlight over the door.

Within, the festivity (if so inappropriate a word may be used) was virtually over. The last remnant of dessert had been cleared away, and divided by the "cook and housekeeper" impartially (according to her standard) between the ladies and gentlemen of the second table and the "supers." The butler had conscientiously locked away all unopened bottles, and, with the assistance of his confrères, finished most of those already tasted, only reserving a decanter or two of the choicer sorts for his private cellar. The white-capped "purveyor's men" had gathered up their ice machinery and departed; still a small, well-appointed brougham, drawn by a steady, handsome horse, and a more showy carriage, with a big, restless, fiery chestnut, lingered. Upstairs in one of the handsomely furnished drawing-rooms, four persons were gathered round a fire, seldom unacceptable before Easter in London.

A tall, good-looking elderly man, not thin, not portly, well set up, dressed, and preserved, with pale clear cold eyes, a straight nose, and thin lips. Next him, nearest the fire, screening her face with a beautifully-painted "rococo" fan, and resting a small black satinbooted foot on the fender, was a lady, past middle age, whose wellarranged draperies of black velvet showed her full but still graceful figure to the greatest advantage. A downy feather or two, a lappet of fairy-like lace, a couple of sparkling, quivering diamond butterflies, made sufficient apology for a matronly head-dress, which her abundant, nearly black hair might have dispensed with.

One foot was, as I have said, resting on the fender, and one hand touched the low, modern mantelshelf, while her eyes-very full

VOL. LXI.

I

light brown eyes-gazed at the fire. The face was not handsome, only the mouth was beautiful.

On her right stood two young men. One tall, slight, very dark, with large, deep-set, handsome eyes, and well-cut chin, the blue-black of a closely shaven beard and moustache showing through his pale, clear skin. A sort of indefinable resemblance to his fair neighbour might have struck a stranger, especially about the mouth, which, though refined, was somewhat full.

The fourth of the party was a short, stout, broad-shouldered man of perhaps thirty, with jewelled studs and a diamond ring. Florid, good-humoured-looking, and very accurately dressed, yet not quite so easy as the rest. He was speaking:

"It is," he said "it is perfectly amazing where the money has come from to pay off such an enormous sum! They say the fellows have brought old stockings and boots, by Jove! full of five-franc pieces and Napoleons, forty and fifty years old, ready to give all to Thiers. It is more than our people would do, I can tell you!"

He spoke a little thickly-not with a lisp, but as if he brought every word to the tip of his tongue, tasted it, and liked the flavour. "I should think not," replied the lady, still gazing at the fire, and in soft, sweet, but very clear tones. Why should our people give their money to Monsieur Thiers?"

"Now--now, Lady Elton! you are too sharp upon a fellow; you know what I mean!"

"How should I?" she returned, with a smile that lit up her face, and lent it a wonderful charm.

"Thiers is all very well for the present," remarked the master of the house, "but the French are far too restless and impractical to remain under his guidance. They will be electing a king or an emperor, and cutting each other's throats before eighteen months are over."

"It is possible," said Lady Elton, as if to the fire; "but they never had such an opportunity of trying constitutionalism before." "First catch your constitution," observed the tall, dark young man, who had been calmly and openly surveying himself in the vast looking-glass over the mantelpiece.

"Suppose you and I run over to Paris," said the first speaker, "and see how it looks, just for the Easter holidays; I have not been there since the siege."

"I am sure it would give me great pleasure, Darnell," returned the other, civilly, "but I have already arranged to go there with Mr. and Mrs. Everard, her sister and Bertie Leigh."

"Oh, indeed! quite a swell party. Well, we may meet there. But I am keeping you up, Mr. Frere, and I am due at the Countess of