The freedom from system which was his strong point had this great advantage, that it preserved his writings from artificial symmetry. He never sacrificed for the sake of the inward equilibrium of his work a syllable of what he thought ought to be said; and much less would he have done so to make his description and his style graphic. He had no aversion for the complicate, the intricate, the unfinished. But the result of his lack of that philosophic spirit which largely consists in a tendency to summarise and the love of a whole as whole, is that one never receives powerful, simple impressions from his works. The important and the less important too often occupy the same plane. Regarded as an artist, he reminds us of those Japanese painters, the great artistic value of whose work began to be acknowledged in Europe about the year 1880. One reason why the pictures of these artists surprise and delight is, that there is not a trace of academic symmetry in them; they never completely satisfy us because they despise perspective, but they bring living things before us as if they were alive. Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer on the 23rd of December 1804. His father, a clever government official and cultured gentleman, was fifty-two before he made up his mind to marry; and his mother at the time of her marriage was nearly forty. Monsieur Sainte-Beuve died before they had been married a year, two months before the birth of his son, whose critically reflective turn of mind was plainly an inheritance from the father he never saw. Sainte-Beuve the elder was interested in all kinds of literature, but especially in poetry; he left his books with their margins crowded with annotations and remarks, the spirit of which curiously anticipates the tendency of his son's writings.[1] Madame Sainte-Beuve, whose mother was an Englishwoman, taught her son English at an early age, and to her is doubtless due his taste (a very uncommon taste in France in those days) for English lyric poetry, for Bowles, Crabbe, Cowper, and especially for Wordsworth and those other poets of the Lake School whom he so often translated and quoted. Something melancholy and prematurely old in his temperament is in all probability attributable partly to the advanced age of both his parents, and partly to the effect produced on his mother's mind, before he was born, by the illness and death of her husband.