work laid out for a month,
and would spend the remainder of the time in private reading. In 1851
he left college, and after two or three unsatisfactory attempts at
teaching, in Paris and in the provinces, he settled down at Paris as a
private student. He gave himself the very best elementary preparation
which a literary man can have,--a thorough course in mathematics and the
physical sciences. His studies in anatomy and physiology were especially
elaborate and minute. He attended the School of Medicine as regularly as
if he expected to make his daily bread in the profession. In this way,
when at the age of twenty-five he began to write books, M. Taine was a
really educated man; and his books show it. The day is past when a man
could write securely, with a knowledge of the classics alone. We doubt
if a philosophical critic is perfectly educated for his task, unless he
can read, for instance, Donaldson's "New Cratylus" on the one hand, and
Rokitansky's "Pathological Anatomy" on the other, for the sheer pleasure
of the thing. At any rate, it was an education of this sort which M.
Taine, at the outset of his literary career, had secured. By this solid
discipline of mathematics, chemistry, and medicine, M. Taine became
that which above all things he now is,--a man possessed of a central
philosophy, of an exact, categorical, well-defined system, which
accompanies and supports him in his most distant literary excursions.
He does not keep throwing out ideas at random, like too many literary
critics, but attaches all his criticisms to a common fundamental
principle; in short, he is not a dilettante, but a savant.

His treatise on La Fontaine, in 1853, attracted much attention, both the
style and the matter being singularly fresh and original. He has since
republished it, with alterations which serve to show that he can be
docile toward intelligent criticisms. About the same time he prepared
for the French Academy his work upon the historian Livy, which was
crowned in 1855. Suffering then from overwork, he was obliged to make
a short journey to the Pyrenees, which he has since described in a
charming little volume, illustrated by Dore.

His subsequent works are a treatise on the French philosophers of
the present century, in which the vapid charlatanism of M. Cousin is
satisfactorily dealt with; a history of English literature in five
volumes; a humorous book on Paris; three volumes upon the general theory
of art; and two volum