ABSTRACT
This chapter frames by Sainte-Beuve accusing Chateaubriand of writing bric-a-brac in his biography of De Rance and, over a century later, Roland Barthes replying to the charge by praising Chateaubriand for the very thing for which Sainte-Beuve had reproved him. There was a battle about bric-a-brac in the nineteenth century which continues to the present. Browning and Newman did not come to intellectual blows over bric-a-brac as Newman and Kingsley did about Catholicism and integrity, or as Ruskin and Whistler did about the nature of Art. Bric-a-brac, however, admits of no distinctions between what it jumbles together or omits, and it is never Browning's intention to provide them. For Keats, Pope's universal language of the heart, which Pope attributes explicitly to his linen-merchant father and implicitly to himself, becomes something which belongs to an elite who alone can recognise 'the holiness of the Heart's affections'.
