RENÉ DOUMIC, one of the most brilliant of the contemporary essayists of France, was born in Paris in 1860, and educated at the Collège Condorcet, where, it is said, “he carried off the most brilliant scholastic honors.” For ten years he held the chair of Rhetoric in the Collège Stanislas in Paris; but in 1884 he began the career of a journalist, which has drawn him from academic work and given him a celebrity he might not have otherwise attained. He has been one of the leading contributors to the Revue des Deux Mondes and to the Journal des Debats, and several volumes of his essays on literature and the drama have been collected and published in permanent form. His admirer M. Theodore Bentzon writes that “M. Doumic is a Christian, a somewhat austere one both as to faith and morals,” and adds that “he acknowledges it frankly.”