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George Edward Bateman Saintsbury

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GEORGE EDWARD BATEMAN SAINTSBURY (1845-), English man of letters, was born at Southampton on the 23rd of October 1845. He was educated at King's College School, London, and at Merton College, Oxford (B.A., 1868), and spent six years in Guernsey as senior classical master of Elizabeth College. From 1874 to 1876 he was headmaster of the Elgin Educational Institute. He began his literary career in 1875 as a critic for the Academy, and for ten years was actively engaged in journalism, becoming an important member of the staff of the Saturday Review. Some of the critical essays contributed to the literary journals were afterwards collected in his Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 (2 vols., 1890-1895), Essays on French Novelists (1891), Miscellaneous Essays (1892), Corrected Impressions (1895). His first book, A Primer of French Literature (1880), and his Short History of French Literature (1882; 6th ed., Oxford, 1901), were followed by a series of editions of French classics and of books and articles on the history of French literature, which made him the most prominent English authority on the subject. His studies in English literature were no less comprehensive, and included the valuable revision of Sir Walter Scott's edition of Dryden's Works (Edinburgh, 18 vols., 1882-1893), Dryden (1881) in the "English Men of Letters" series, History of Elizabethan Literature (1887), History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896), A Short History of English Literature (1898, 3rd ed. 1903), an edition of the Minor Caroline Poets of the Caroline Period (2 vols., 1905-1906), a collection of rare poems of great value, and editions of English classics. He edited the series of "Periods of European Literature," contributing the volumes on The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (1897), and The Earlier Renaissance (1901). In 1895 he became professor of rhetoric and English literature at Edinburgh university, and subsequently produced two of his most important works, A History of Criticism (3 vols., 1900-1904), with the companion volume Loci Critici, Passages Illustrative of Critical Theory and Practice (Boston, U.S.A., and London, 1903), and A History of English Prosody from the 12th Century to the Present Day (i., 1906; ii., 1908; iii., 1910); also The Later Nineteenth Century (1909).

A town of western France, in the department of Ille-et-Vilaine, on the right bank of the Rance, south of St Malo, from which it is separated by the Anse des Sablons, a creek 1 m. wide (see ST Malo). Pop. (1906) 9765. It is not enclosed by walls, and with its new houses, straight wide streets and numerous gardens forms a contrast to its neighbour. North of the town there is a wet-dock, 27 acres in extent, forming part of the harbour of St Malo. The creek on which it opens is dry at low water, but at high water is 30 to 40 ft. deep. The dock is used chiefly by coasting and fishing vessels, a fleet starting annually for the Newfoundland cod-fisheries. Two other ports on the Rance, south-west of the town at the foot of the tower of Solidor, are of small importance. This stronghold, erected towards the close of the 14th century by John IV., duke of Brittany, for the purpose of contesting the claims to the temporal sovereignty of the town of Josselin de Rohan, bishop of St Malo, consists of three distinct towers formed into a triangle by loopholed and machicolated curtains. To the west St Servan terminates in a peninsula on which stands the "cite," inhabited by work-people, and the "fort de la cite"; near by is a modern chapel which has replaced the cathedral of St Peter of Aleth, the seat of a bishopric from the 6th to the 12th century. The parish church is modern (1742-1842). St Servan has a communal college. It carries on steam-sawing, boat-building, ropemaking and the manufacture of ship's biscuits.

The "Cite" occupies the site of the city of Aleth, which at the close of the Roman empire supplanted Corseul as the capital of the Curiosolites. Aleth was a bulwark of Druidism in those regions and was not Christianized till the 6th century, when St Malo became its first bishop. On the removal of the bishopric to St Malo Aleth declined and was almost destroyed by St Louis in 1235; the houses that remained standing became the nucleus of a new community, originating from St Malo, which placed itself under the patronage of St Servan, apostle of the Orkneys. It was not till the Revolution that St Servan became a separate commune from St Malo with a municipality and police of its own.

A town of south-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Landes, 11 m. S.S.W. of Mont de Marsan on the Southern railway between that town and Bayonne. Pop. (1906) town, 2508; commune, 4644. St Sever stands on an eminence on the left bank of the Adour in the district of the Chalosse. Its streets, bordered in places by old houses, are narrow and winding. The promenade of Morlanne laid out on the site of a Roman camp called Palestrion commands a fine view of the Adour and the pine forests of the Landes. The church of St Sever, a Romanesque building of the 12th century, with seven apses, once belonged to the Benedictine abbey founded in the 10th century. The public institutions of the town include the sub-prefecture, a tribunal of first instance, and a practical school of agriculture and viticulture which occupies a former Dominican convent. There is trade in the agricultural products of the Chalosse, especially geese.