This could not have been said with truth during the lifetime of Sainte-Beuve, but since his death it is true.  There is nothing, apparently, which Taine is not competent to criticise, so subtle is his intellect, and so wide the range of his studies, but what he is most competent to criticise is Art.  We have heard great things of a History of English Literature by him, but as it has not yet appeared in an English dress (although Messrs. Holt & Williams have a translation of it in press) we shall reserve our decision until it appears.  Art, it seems to us, is the specialty to which Taine has devoted himself, with the enthusiasm peculiar to his countrymen, and a thoroughness peculiar to himself.  Others may have accumulated greater stores of art-knowledge—­the knowledge indispensable to the historian of Art, and the biographer of artists—­but none has so saturated himself with the spirit of Art as Taine.  We may not always agree with him, but he is always worth listening to, and what he says is worthy of our serious consideration.  We think he is too philosophical sometimes, but then the fault may be in us.  It may be that we are so accustomed to the materialism of the English critics that we fail, at first, to apprehend the spirituality of this most refined and refining of Frenchmen.  No English critic could have written his “Art in Greece,” because no English critic could put himself in his place.  We know what the English think of Greek Art, or may, with a little reading:  what Taine thinks of it is—­that it is what it is, simply because the Greeks were what they were.  Before he tells us what Greek Art is, he tells us what the Greeks were.  Nor does he stop here, but goes on to tell us, or rather begins by telling us, what kind of a country it was in which they dwelt, what skies shone over them, what mountains looked down upon them, in the shadow of what trees they walked within sight of the wine-dark sea.  He begins at the beginning, as the children say.  Whether he succeeds in convincing us that it was Greece alone which made the Greeks what they were, depends somewhat upon the cast of our minds, and somewhat upon our power to resist his eloquence.  We think, ourselves, that he lays too much stress upon the mere outward environment of the Grecian people.  The influence exercised over their lives, by the Institutions which grew up out of these lives—­the influence, in short, of their purely physical culture—­is admirably described, as is also the difference between this culture and ours: 

“Modern people are Christian, and Christianity is a religion of second growth which opposes natural instinct.  We may liken it to a violent contraction which has inflected the primitive attitude of the human mind.  It proclaims, in effect, that the world is sinful, and that man is depraved—­which certainly is indisputable in the century in which it was born.  According to it, man must change his ways.  Life here below is simply an exile; let