hich had
cramped and starved French literature, there could be no doubt of
success when a champion such as Victor Hugo took up and carried through
to the end the task of championship.

[Sidenote: Sainte-Beuve.]

It is very seldom that the two different forces of criticism and
creation work together as they did in the case of the Romantic movement.
Each had numerous representatives, but the point of importance is that
each was represented by one of the greatest masters. Charles Augustin
Sainte-Beuve, the critic not merely of the Romantic movement, but of the
nineteenth century, and in a manner the first scientific and universal
critic that the world has seen, was born at Boulogne on the 23rd of
December, 1804. His father held an office of some importance; his mother
was of English blood. He was well educated, first at his native town,
then at Paris. He began by studying medicine, but very soon turned to
literature, and, as has been said, distinguished himself on the _Globe_.
The most important of his articles in this paper were devoted to the
French literature of the sixteenth century, and these were published as
a volume, in 1828, with great success. Sainte-Beuve at once became the
critic _en titre_ of the movement, though he did not very long continue
in formal connection with it. It was some time, however, before he
resigned himself to purely critical work. _Les Poesies de Joseph
Delorme_, _Les Consolations_, and _Volupte_ were successive attempts at
original composition, which, despite the talent of their author, hardly
made much mark, or deserved to make it. He did not persevere further in
a career for which he was evidently unfitted, but betook himself to the
long series of separate critical studies, partly of foreign and
classical literature, but usually of French, which made his reputation.
The papers to which he chiefly contributed were the _Constitutionnel_
and the _Moniteur_, and during the middle of this century his Monday
_feuilletons_ of criticism were the chief recurring literary event of
Europe. These studies were at intervals collected and published in sets
under the titles _Critiques et Portraits Litteraires_, _Portraits
Contemporains_, _Causeries du Lundi_, and _Nouveaux Lundis_, the last
series only finishing with his death in 1869. Besides this he had
undertaken a single work of great magnitude in his _Histoire de Port
Royal_, on which he spent some twenty years. He was elected to the
Academy in 18