Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/159

 Rh by Mr. Walter Bagehot, we will better understand tills admirable quality of restraint. Mr. Bagehot's paper is delightful from beginning to end; keen, sympathetic, humorous, and sparkling all over with little brilliant asides about Peel's Act, and the South Sea Company, and grave powdered footmen, and Louis XIV., "carefully amusing himself with dreary trifles." Underneath its whimsical exaggerations we recognize clearly the truthful outlines and general fidelity of the sketch. But Sainte-Beuve indulges in none of these witty and wandering fancies. He is keenly alive to the proper limitations of his subject; he has but a single purpose in mind, that of helping you to accurately understand the character and the life's work of the great historian whom he is reviewing; and, while his humor plays lambently on every page, he never makes any conscious effort to be diverting. Nothing can be more sprightly than Mr. Bagehot's account of Gibbon's early conversion to the Church of Rome, and of the horror and alarm he awoke thereby at the manor-house of Buriton, where "it would probably have occasioned less sensation if 'dear Edward' had announced his