45, and after the establishment of the Empire he was one of
the few distinguished literary men who took its side. The first reward
that he obtained was a professorship in the College de France; but some
years before his death he received the senatorship, a lucrative
position, and one which interfered very little with the studies of the
occupant. In character Sainte-Beuve strongly resembled some of the
epicureans of his favourite seventeenth century; but whatever faults he
may have had were redeemed by much good-nature and an entire absence of
literary vanity.

[Sidenote: His Method.]

[Sidenote: Dangers of the Method.]

The importance of Sainte-Beuve in literature is historically, and as a
matter of influence, superior even to that of the great poet with whom
he was for some time in close friendship, though before very long their
stars fell apart. Until his time the science of criticism had been
almost entirely conducted on what may be called pedagogic lines. The
critic either constructed for himself, or more probably accepted from
tradition, a cut-and-dried scheme of the correct plan of different kinds
of literature, and contented himself with adjusting any new work to
this, marking off its agreements or differences, and judging
accordingly. Here and there in French literature critics like
Saint-Evremond, Fenelon, La Bruyere in part, Diderot, Joubert, had
adopted another method, but the small acquaintance which most Frenchmen
possessed of literature other than their own stood in the way of
success. Sainte-Beuve was the first to found criticism on a wide study
of literature, instead of directing a more or less narrow study of
literature by critical rules. Victor Hugo himself has laid down, in the
preface to the _Orientales_, one important principle--the principle that
the critic has only to judge of the intrinsic goodness of the book, and
not of its conformity to certain pre-established ideas. There remains
the difficulty of deciding what is intrinsically good or bad. To solve
this, the only way is, first, to prepare the mind of the critic by a
wide study of literature, which may free him from merely local and
national prejudices; and, secondly, to direct his attention not so much
to cut-and-dried ideas of an epic, a sonnet, a drama, as to the object
which the author himself had before him when he composed his work. In
carrying out this principle it becomes obviously of great importance to
study the man himself as we