Jean-Baptiste Joseph Émile Montégut (14 June 1825 - 11 December 1895), was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

.

He was born at Limoges

Limoges

Limoges |Limousin]] dialect of Occitan) is a city and commune, the capital of the Haute-Vienne department and the administrative capital of the Limousin région in west-central France....

. He began to write for the Revue des deux mondes

Revue des deux mondes

The Revue des deux Mondes is a French language monthly literary and cultural affairs magazine that has been published in Paris since 1829....

in 1847, contributing between 1851 and 1857 a series of articles on the English and American novel, and in 1857 he became chief literary critic of the review. Émile Montégut translated Essais de philosophie américaine (1850) from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...

; Revolution de 1688 (2 vols. 1853) from Thomas Macaulay's History; and also produced the Œuvres completes (10 vols. 1868-1873) of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

.

Among his numerous critical works are Ecrivains modernes d'Angleterre (3rd series, 1885-1892) and Heures de lecture d'un critique (1891), studies of John Aubrey

John Aubrey

John Aubrey FRS, was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer. He is perhaps best known as the author of the collection of short biographical pieces usually referred to as Brief Lives...

, Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

, Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. He was very popular during the Victorian era and wrote 30 novels, more than 60 short stories, 14 plays, and over 100 non-fiction pieces...

 and Sir John Mandeville.