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I like to think about that great French critic and historian, Hippolyte Adolphe
Taine.
I like to think about his great French critical and historical brain.
He died in 1893 at the age of sixty-five,
But previously he had been alive.
He wrote many books of outstanding worth,
But this was before his death, although following his birth.
He tried to interpret human culture in terms of outer environment,
And he knew exactly what the biographers of Rousseau and Shelley and Lord
Byron meant.
His great philosophical work, De l'intelligence, in which be connected
physiology with psychology, was written after meeting a girl named
Lola,
And greatly influenced the pens of Flaubert, de Maupassant, and Zola.
He did much to establish positivism in France,
And his famous History of English Literature was written on purpose and not
by chance.
Yes, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine may have been only five foot three, but he
was a scholar of the most discerning;
Whereas his oafish brother Casimir, although he stood six foot seven in his
bobby-socks, couldn't spell C-H-A-T, cat, and was pointed at as the
long Taine that had no learning.
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