George Saintsbury was in the taste business. By profession, he made judgments of taste on works of literature. He produced dozens of editions of the work of novelists and poets and more than 50 monographs, including A History of Elizabethan Literature, A History of English Prosody, The English Novel, A History of the French Novel and, self-referentially, books about books about books - A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, A History of English Criticism. In late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was the supreme arbiter of literary taste, the 'king of critics'. He had established a reputation as an editor, reviewer and political journalist by the mid-1870s, before becoming regius professor of rhetoric and English literature at Edinburgh from 1895 to 1915. Yet even in the 1890s, rival critics thought his work 'old-fashioned', and none of his monographs is currently to be had in a properly published form (although some of his editions are in print). His style doesn't suit our deconstructionist and contextualising times, and modern sensibilities are embarrassed by his critical confidence and his preciousness, projected in sentences as stuffed as a Victorian drawing-room:

LRB 10 September 2009 | PDF Download