establish an order and a hierarchy in letters, to regulate intellectual pleasures, was Nisard's aim; but in attempting to constitute an exact science founded upon general principles, he too often derived those principles from the attractions and repulsions of his individual taste. Criticism retrograded in his hands; yet, in retrograding, it took up a strong position: the influence of such a teacher was not untimely when facile sympathies required the guidance or the check of a director. The admirable critic of the romantic school, CHARLES-AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE (1804-69), developed, as time went on, into the great critic of the naturalistic method. In his _Tableau de la Poesie Francaise au XVIe Siecle_ he found ancestors for the romantic poets as much older than the ancestors of classical art in France as Ronsard is older than Malherbe. Wandering endlessly from author to author in his _Portraits Litteraires_ and _Portraits Contemporains_, he studied in all its details what we may term the physiology of each. The long research of spirits connected with his most sustained work, _Port-Royal_, led him to recognise certain types or families under which the various minds of men can be grouped and classified. During a quarter of a century he investigated, distinguished, defined in the vast collection of little monographs which form the _Causeries du Lundt_ and the _Nouveaux Lundis_. They formed, as it were, a natural history of intellects and temperaments; they established a new method, and illustrated that method by a multitude of examples.