The present.
It is half pleasant and half unpleasant to conclude this notice of French criticism with only a reference to those distinguished living representatives of it who hold up its banner and spread its sails to all the winds of the spirit. To name no juniors, I have already had more than one occasion to refer to the great erudition, the remarkable acuteness, and the practised critical method of M. Ferdinand Brunetière. These qualities, with an agreeable and sufficient difference, appear also in M. Émile Faguet: while M. Anatole France illustrates a more strictly impressionist, and a lighter kind of our office with one of the most charming styles that any living European writer uses for the pleasure of the human race; and there are many who greatly admire the wit, the alertness, and the truly Gallic nonchalance of M. Jules Lemaître. They have all written for some considerable time: may they put on none but Academic immortality for at least as much longer!
[827]. His books are too numerous to catalogue, and too equal in merit and defect to select from.
[828]. Tableau de la marche, &c., de la Littérature Française: Paris, 1828. It may also be found at the end of the Didot ed. of La Harpe’s Cours de Littérature.
[829]. He was a friend of my father’s in his English days, and I remember long ago seeing letters of his signed “Chasles d’Almar,” after a not uncommon French fashion.
[830]. It fills perhaps the major part of the great collection of articles called Les Œuvres et les Hommes (15 vols., Paris, 1860-95).
[831]. xi. 72.
[832]. See vol. xiii. of Les Œuvres et les Hommes.
[833]. Note that the last outrage—commune—avenges Miss Austen of Madame de Staël.