To speak of an artist, whether in pigments, marbles, or words, as a lover of the beautiful will at once suggest to the “practical” reader a deep-eyed dreamer with soulful, upturned look, devoid of humour, and affecting a Bunthorne stride. Not so Gautier. Robust of body, almost coarse of physiognomy, and bubbling with life, he could mix his colors with humor, tone his admirations with censure, charge his prodigious memory with endless detail, and train his observation to the minutest accuracy. There was something sensual as well as sensuous in his mind, and he was saved from grovelling only by the dominance of that subtle perception and admiration for the beautiful in _all_ its phases, which challenges continual comment in any consideration of the man and his work. Gautier was esthetic without being an esthete, witty yet not a wit, sentient but not sentimental, sensual though not gross. * * * * * A journey to the heart of Gautier leads by way of his outward life. Tarbes, in the south of France, Department of the Hautes-Pyrénées, was the place of his birth, August 31, 1811. Jean-Pierre Gautier, his father, was in the revenue service, and an ardent royalist. He hailed from the Avignon of the Popes that Alphonse Daudet has chronicled so delightfully. Our author’s mother, Adélaïde-Antoinette Cocard, was a tailor’s daughter, and a noted beauty, whose sister had married into the nobility. When Théophile was only three years old, his parents removed to Paris, but even at that elastic age the lad retained his love for the South, and, like his father, often repined for its warmth and color. He was a precocious youngster, beginning at five to devour books--_Paul and Virginia_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ among others. The inevitable _Lycée Louis-le-Grand_ was his academy, and by no means a happy prison it proved for the impressionable child, so poetic in temperament. Fortunately, his father soon took him home and entered him as a day-pupil elsewhere. In his boyhood Théophile became a worshiper of that master romanticist, Victor Hugo, whom he was permitted to meet while yet a youth of nineteen, and who graciously encouraged the boy to publish his verses. Though Gautier afterward laughed delightedly and delightfully at the extremes of the earlier romantic school, and though both in his historical work on romanticism and in his papers on contemporaneous writers, his biting satire searched out its weaknesses, he never ceased to feel its influence and cherish a reverence for its anointed apostle, the creator of _Les Misérables_.