THE OPENING essay of Taine’s “History of English Literature” is one of the most important of the nineteenth century and perhaps more characteristic than any other of what has been peculiarly the nineteenth-century method in the study of literature and of history. In order to reach a base for his “History of English Literature,” he was not content to study England as he saw it in his lifetime. He went backward over the course of the development of the English character until he found its germ in the Saxons and Angles, men with “huge white bodies, cool blooded, with fierce blue eyes,”—to account for whom he left England to study on the coasts of the North Sea, the morasses and fogs in which two thousand years ago the barbarians whom Rome could not subdue, led “a sad and precarious existence, as it were, face to face with beasts of prey.” Literature now has been carried far back towards its origin in human nature itself. Human nature is to be studied as it is affected by soil and climate, by environment in all its manifestations, and by the pressure of men upon each other. Art thus studied is traced back to the time of the cave man, and is accounted for in everything but the details of its development when the first rude picture is found scratched upon the ivory of a mammoth tusk. Literature, by the same rule, is followed to its beginnings in the “runes” on the staves of the bards or on the sword blades of the warriors of a period almost as remote as the time when the peoples of Europe were still septs of a single tribe, speaking a common language and having a common origin. The action of man upon nature, the reflex action of nature upon man, are considered as the springs of history, in all its phases. This idea, as its controls the literary methods of Taine, is chiefly what made him so remarkable among the great critics of his century, but he is also a master of prose style, as eminent among French writers as Macaulay is among English. He was born at Vouziers, France, April 21st, 1828. His education was careful and thorough, including, as it did, courses in medicine and general science after he had taken the highest honors of the Collège Bourbon in Paris. In 1864 he became professor of Æsthetics at the École des Beaux Arts, and in 1864 and 1865 published the work by which he is best known to readers of English,—the always memorable “History of English Literature,”—with which, whether it be considered as a series of essays or as a critical history of the development of English literature, there is nothing else to compare. It is, however, only one of many works of great brilliancy published by Taine between 1853, when he took his doctor’s degree on his “Essay on the Fables of La Fontaine,” and 1891, when his “Le Régime Moderne” appeared. He died at Paris, March 5th, 1893.