in _Le Temps_, and one that put the pompous academician into a fury. Catulle Mendès sang the praises of the early France poems: "Les Noces Corinthiennes alone would have sufficed to place him in the first rank, and to preserve his name from the shipwreck of oblivion," declared M. Mendès. In 1881, with The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard he won the attention of the reading world, a crown from the Academy, and the honour of being translated into a half-dozen languages. From that time he became an important figure in literary Paris, while his reputation was further fortified by his criticisms of books--vagrom criticism, yet charged with charm and learning. He followed Jules Claretie on _Le Temps_, and there he wrote for five years (1886-1891) the _critiques_, which appeared later in four volumes, entitled La Vie Littéraire. Georg Brandes had said that, in the strict sense of the word, M. France is not a great critic. But Anatole France has said this before him. He despises pretentious official criticism, the criticism that distributes good and bad marks to authors in a pedagogic fashion. He may not be so "objective" as his one-time adversary, Ferdinand Brunetière, but he is certainly more convincing. The quarrel, a famous one in its day, seems rather faded in our days of critical indifference. After his clever formula, that there is no such thing as objective criticism, that all criticism but records the adventures of one's soul among the masterpieces, France was attacked by Brunetière--of whom the ever-acute Mr. James once remarked that his "intelligence has not kept pace with his learning." Those critical watchwords, "subjective" and "objective," are things of yester-year, and one hopes, forever. But in this instance there was much ink spilt, witty on the part of France, deadly earnest from the pen of Brunetière. The former annihilated his adversary by the mode metaphysical. He demonstrated that in the matter of judgment we are prisoners of our ideas, and he also formed a school that has hardly done him justice, for every impressionistic value is not necessarily valid. It is easy to send one's soul boating among masterpieces and call the result "criticism"; the danger lies in the contingency that one may not boast the power of artistic navigation possessed by Anatole France, a master steersman in the deeps and shallows of literature. His own critical contributions are notable. Studies of Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Renan, Balzac, Zola, Pascal, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Rabelais, Hamlet, Baudelaire, George Sand, Paul Verlaine--a masterpiece of intuition and sympathy this last--and many others, vivify and adorn all they touch. A critic such as Sainte-Beuve, or Taine, or Brandes, France is not; but he exercises an unfailing spell in everything he signs. His "august vagabondage"--the phrase is Mr. Whibley's--through the land of letters has proved a boon to all students.