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." "My poor Castruccio," replied De Montaigne, with a half-sigh; "he is one of those victims whom I believe to be more common than we dream of--men whose aspirations are above their powers.