Taine, tan, Hippolyte Adolphe (1828-1893), a distinguished French historian and critic. He was educated in Paris and held various educational positions both in the provinces and in Paris, including a chair in the Paris School of Fine Arts. He was granted an honorary Doctorate of Laws by Oxford in 1871. He was also a member of the French Academy. The list of his writings is a long one. His best known are his English Literature and a History of Contemporary France. In his discussion of the French he scores Royalists and Republicans alike. Taine was especially severe in his treatment of Napoleon. His History of English Literature has been translated into many languages, including our own. It is the most celebrated work of the kind yet written. Taine takes the ground that the native temperament of a nation, the physical features or environment of the country, the age in which the writers flourish, and the duration of a period of literature determine in a measure the kind of writings produced, just as certain chemicals placed together in a test tube produce a given result on combination. Race, epoch, substance are, according to Taine, the primary springs from which a literature bursts forth. To his notion, then, the plays of Shakespeare could have been produced at no other time, in no other country, and by no other people; on the other hand, it was but natural that the English people, living in the sort of a country they did, should at this particular period of time produce a series of dramatic works through Shakespeare or some other natural genius. Taine's history is a piece of brilliant writing. His themes have attracted universal attention. The weakness of his argument lies in the fact, however, that it is seemingly easy to account for literary production after it has appeared, but that the closest study of factors fails to reveal the time or place when more masterpieces are to be expected. Even the most devoted disciple of Taine cannot forecast the literature of the next decade, let alone the incoming century. Taine is a writer whose work always produces a disagreeable impression upon me, as though of a creaking of pulleys and a clicking of machinery. There is a smell of the laboratory about it. The book is instructive in the highest degree, but instead of animating and stirring, it parches, corrodes, and saddens the reader.--Amiel.