VINET, Alexandre Rodolphe (1797-1847), a French critic, though not a Frenchman, was born near Lausanne on 17th June 1797. He was educated for and duly entered the ministry of the Protestant Church, the date of his ordination being 1819. He had, however, already acquired an important position as teacher of the French language and literature in the gymnasium at Basel, and during the whole of his life he was more of a critic than of a theologian, though he exercised some influence in the latter capacity, headed a secession from the national church in Vaud, was for a time professor of theology at Lausanne, and advocated an extreme toleration in the matter of religious formulas, together with the separation of church and state. As a theologian Vinet would already have been long forgotten, despite some sermons and treatises which had a certain vogue in his native country, and, being in part translated into English, exercised some influence on English-speaking adherents of Calvinism. His performances as a literary critic, which for the most part represent his academic lectures, are, however, of greater importance. By procuring for Sainte-Beuve an invitation to lecture at Lausanne on Port-Royal, he was the cause of one of the capital works of recent French literary history. But he had less indirect titles to fame in the same department than this. Like all other French writers of repute in Switzerland, he has been accused by French-born censors of that mysterious patavinity which is supposed to attach to Swiss French, and which has been illustrated in such a remarkable fashion by Rousseau, Benjamin Constant, Joseph and Xavier de Maistre, Töpffer, and others. But the persons thus branded were probably content to write French as well as Livy wrote Latin. Vinet’s Chrestomathie ...