Ferdinand Brunetière, the celebrated French literary critic, was born in Toulon, the great military Mediterranean sea-port of France, in the year 1849. His studies were begun in the college of his native city and continued in Paris, in the Lycée Louis le Grand, where in the class of philosophy he came under Professor Émile Charles, by whose original and profound though decidedly sad way of thinking he was powerfully influenced. His own ambition then was to become a teacher in the University of France, an ambition which seemed unlikely to be ever realized, as he failed to secure admission to the celebrated École Normale Supérieure, in the competitive examination which leads up to that school. Strangely enough, about fifteen years later he was, though not in possession of any very high University degree, appointed to the Professorship of French Literature in the school which he had been unable to enter as a scholar, and his appointment received the hearty indorsement of all the leading educational authorities in France. [Illustration: Ferdiand Brunetière] For several years after leaving the Lycée Louis le Grand, while completing his literary outfit by wonderfully extensive reading, Ferdinand Brunetière lived on stray orders for work for publishers. He seldom succeeded in getting these, and when he got any they were seldom filled. Thus he happened to be commissioned by the firm of Germer, Baillière and Company to write a history of Russia, which never was and to all appearances never will be written. The event which determined the direction of his career was the acceptance by the Revue des Deux Mondes, in 1875, of an article upon contemporary French novelists. François Buloz, the energetic and imperious founder and editor of the world-famed French bi-monthly, felt that he had found in the young critic the man whom French literary circles had been waiting for, and who was to be Sainte-Beuve's successor; and François Buloz was a man who seldom made mistakes. French literary criticism was just then at a very low ebb. Sainte-Beuve had been dead about five years; his own contemporaries, Edmond Schérer for instance, were getting old and discouraged; the new generation seemed to be turning unanimously, in consequence of the disasters of the Franco-German war and of the Revolution of September, 1870, to military or political activity. The only form of literature which had power to attract young writers was the novel, which they could fill with the description of all the passions then agitating the public mind. That a man of real intellectual strength should then give his undivided attention to pure literature seemed a most unlikely phenomenon; but all had to acknowledge that the unlikely had happened, soon after Ferdinand Brunetière had become the regular literary critic of the Revue des Deux Mondes.