Despite the praise given Victor Hugo, his biography, from a critical standpoint, is practically worthless. In it there is no sense of critical proportion: it is a mere panegyric which definitely states that Hugo was greater than Balzac. This astonishing and incompetent praise is accounted for when we discover that it was written by Swinburne who, as is generally admitted, was a better poet than critic. In fact, turning to Swinburne’s biography, we find the following valuation of Swinburne as critic: “The very qualities which gave his poetry its unique charm and character were antipathetic to his success as a critic. He had very little capacity for cool and reasoned judgment, and his criticism is often a tangled thicket of prejudices and predilections.... Not one of his studies is satisfactory as a whole; the faculty for the sustained exercise of the judgment was denied him, and even his best appreciations are disfigured by error in taste and proportion.” Here we have the Encyclopædia’s own condemnation of some of its material—a personal and frank confession of its own gross inadequacy and bias! And Swinburne, let it be noted, contributes no less than ten articles on some of the most important literary men in history! If the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ was as naïf and honest about revealing the incapacity of all of its critics as it is in the case of Swinburne, there would be no need for me to call attention to those other tangled thickets of prejudices and predilections which have enmeshed so many of the gentlemen who write for it. But the inadequacy of the _Britannica_ as a reference book on modern French letters can best be judged by the fact that there appears no biographical mention whatever of Romain Rolland, Pierre de Coulevain, Tinayre, René Boylesve, Jean and Jérôme Tharaud, Henry Bordeaux, or Pierre Mille. Rolland is the most gifted and conspicuous figure of the new school of writers in France to-day, and the chief representative of a new phase of French literature. Pierre de Coulevain stands at the head of the women novelists in modern France; and her books are widely known in both England and America. Madame Tinayre’s art, to quote an eminent English critic, “reflects the dawn of the new French spirit.” Boylesve stands for the classic revival in French letters, and ranks in the forefront of contemporary European writers. The Tharauds became famous as novelists as far back as 1902, and hold a high place among the writers of Young France. Bordeaux’s novels have long been familiar in translation even to American readers; and Pierre Mille holds very much the same place in France that Kipling does in England. Yet not only does not one of these noteworthy authors have a biography, but their names do not appear throughout the entire Encyclopædia!