His image will long recur to the inner vision of his friends, as he went marching to his lecture or to his newspaper-office, nonchalant and easy, with his hands in his pockets, his elbow squeezing that enormous umbrella to his side. In the evening he would go, inelegantly dressed, in the same loosely martial way, to the theatre, for which he had an inordinate affection. He was not a "first-nighter," but dropped in to see a new piece whenever he wanted copy for his _feuilleton_. His lectures, it is reported, were familiar and conversational, with frequent repetition and copious quotation, the whole poured out as a man tells a story which he intimately knows, with an inexhaustible flow of thoughts and facts. Sometimes he was so vivacious as to be a little paradoxical, and led a laugh against himself. He stood before his students, formidable only in his erudition, easy of approach, austere and gay. His congested rooms in the Rue Monge were open to any young inquirer, but it was observed that Faguet never asked what the name of his visitor was, but how old he was. The younger the student, the less dogmatic was the professor, but the more familiar, abundant, sympathetic. It was noticeable in all his relations, with young and old alike, that Faguet's one aim invariably seemed to be honestly to make his interlocutor comprehend the matter in hand. Some recollections of the outer presence of Emile Faguet should not be without value to us in fixing the character of his inner life, the spirit which pervaded his profuse and honest labour. No one in the history of literature has been more distinguished for intellectual probity; and no one has cared less for appearances, or for the glorification of his own character and cleverness. His value as a critic consists primarily in his capacity for thoroughly understanding what each author under consideration meant by this or that expression of his art. Faguet does not allow himself to be stung into eloquence by the touch of a master-mind, as Lemaître does, nor does he fly off from his subject on the wings of an imperative suggestion, like Anatole France, but he sticks close to the matter in hand, so close that he reaches comprehension by becoming absorbed in it. There is no writer on literature who has ever crept so completely into the skin of each old author as Faguet has done. He makes the dry bones live; he resuscitates the dead, and revives in them all that was essential in their original life, all that was really vital in them, even if it be ultimately to condemn the taste or the tendency exhibited. The first object with him is to vivify; to analyse and dissect come next.