pe of humanity in its endless Odyssey--in his _Napoleon_, his
_Promethee_, his vast encyclopaedic allegory _Merlin l'Enchanteur_
(1860), his poetry lacked form, and yielded itself to the rhetoric
of the intellect.

In the _Genie des Religions_ Quinet endeavoured to exhibit the
religious idea as the germinative power of civilisation, giving its
special character to the political and social idea. _La Revolution_,
which is perhaps his most important work, attempts to replace the
Revolutionary hero-worship, the Girondin and Jacobin legends, by a
faithful interpretation of the meaning of events. The principles of
modern society and the principles of the Roman Catholic Church, Quinet
regarded as incapable of conciliation. In the incompetence of the
leaders to perceive and apply this truth, and in the fatal logic of
their violent and anarchic methods, lay, as he believed, the causes
of the failure which followed the bright hopes of 1789. In 1848 Quinet
was upon the barricades; the Empire drove him into exile. In his elder
years, like Michelet, he found a new delight in the study of nature.
_La Creation_ (1870) exhibits the science of nature and that of human
history as presenting the same laws and requiring kindred methods.
It closes with the prophecy of science that creation is not yet fully
accomplished, and that a nobler race will enter into the heritage
of our humanity.

II

Literary criticism in the eighteenth century had been the criticism
of taste or the criticism of dogma; in the nineteenth century it became
naturalistic--a natural history of individual minds and their
products, a natural history of works of art as formed or modified
by social, political, and moral environments, and by the tendencies
of races. Such criticism must inevitably have followed the growth
of the comparative study of literatures in an age dominated by the
scientific spirit. If we are to name any single writer as its founder,
we must name Mme. de Stael. The French nation, she explained in
_L'Allemagne_, inclines towards what is classical; the Teutonic
nations incline towards what is romantic. She cares not to say whether
classical or romantic art should be preferred; it is enough to show
that the difference of taste results not from accidental causes, but
from the primitive sources of imagination and of thought.

The historical tendency, proceeding from the eighteenth century,
influenced alike the study of philosophy, of politics, and of