which they saw the form, and never caught the spirit. What so little
Roman, Greek, Hebrew, as their Roman, Greek, and Hebrew dramas? Your
rude Shakespeare's /Julius Caesar/--even his /Troilus and
Cressida/--have the ancient spirit, precisely as they are imitations of
nothing ancient. But our Frenchmen copied the giant images of old just
as the school-girl copies a drawing, by holding it up to the window, and
tracing the lines on silver paper."

"But your new writers--De Stael--Chateaubriand?"*

* At the time of this conversation the later school, adorned by Victor
Hugo, who, with notions of art elaborately wrong, is still a man of
extraordinary genius, had not risen into its present equivocal
reputation.

"I find no fault with the sentimentalists," answered the severe critic,
"but that of exceeding feebleness. They have no bone and muscle in
their genius--all is flaccid and rotund in its feminine symmetry. They
seem to think that vigour consists in florid phrases and little
aphorisms, and delineate all the mighty tempests of the human heart with
the polished prettiness of a miniature-painter on ivory. No!--these two
are children of another kind--affected, tricked-out, well-dressed
children--very clever, very precocious--but children still. Their
whinings, and their sentimentalities, and their egotism, and their
vanity, cannot interest masculine beings who know what life and its
stern objects are."

"Your brother-in-law," said Maltravers with a slight smile, "must find
in you a discouraging censor."