It is peculiarly interesting to watch in Sainte-Beuve, as in Darwin, the working and the complication of the scientific spirit with the more personal elements. Sainte-Beuve made much more definite assertion than Darwin did, of sacrificing and effacing the personal life for scientific purposes. The Frenchman boasted that he mingled with all sorts of groups and associated himself with all sorts of causes and experiences, not from devotion to the things themselves, but from pure curiosity and from the passion for analyzing the working of these causes in human minds. He carried this so far that he was often accused of disloyalty to his friends and of espousing causes and then deserting them, and he himself handles the defense of the subjective attitude in such a way as to give some justification for the charge. His life, his thought, his work, were perfectly impersonal, he said, and in consequence he was epigrammatically branded with betraying all truths for the sake of truth. On the other hand, it is very evident that some personal elements lingered about him much more than he thought or admitted. His early ambition, his undying ambition, was to be a poet. As a poet he failed, at least made no popular or conspicuous success. He saw the ardent contemporaries and close associates of his youth, Hugo, Lamartine, Balzac, Sand, Musset, making great popular reputations, while he was compelled to drag along in comparative shadow; and for all his boasted impersonality, this to a certain extent embittered him. The vast comprehension, the high intellectual impartiality, which distinguish him when he is dealing with the past, fail and shrink in a measure when he discusses contemporary work, and you cannot but feel that he is unconsciously hampered and tormented by a jealousy from which Darwin was wholly and nobly free. But what marks Sainte-Beuve’s work most of all, as I have elsewhere emphasized, and what distinguishes him from Darwin and many other notable scientists, is the extraordinary concreteness of it. He had of course a vast background of general intellectual training and experience and of conversance with general thought and principles. But with this background always instinctively present, he devoted himself directly to the study of individuals. Only rarely does he deal in the discussion of theories of any sort, and then his handling is apt to be so complex and difficult that you feel him to be out of his element. What fascinates and absorbs him is the endless, close, minute, sympathetic study of individual men and women, and just because he is not hampered by theories, has no ends to attain nor points to prove, the study is endlessly varied, flexible, mobile, adaptable, and profoundly, inexhaustibly human. The incessant, fruitful application of scientific method has never been better exemplified than in Sainte-Beuve’s work.