An inspection apparatus and method are provided capable of suppressing electron beam focus drifts and irradiation-position deviations caused by sample surface charge-up by irradiation of an electron beam during micropattern inspection to thereby avoid false defect detection and also shorten an inspection time. The apparatus captures a plurality of images of alignment marks provided at dies, stores in a storage device deviations between the central coordinates of alignment mark images and the coordinates of the marks as a coordinate correction value, measures heights at a plurality of coordinates on the sample surface, captures images of the measured coordinates to perform focus adjustment, saves the relationship between such adjusted values and the sensor-measured heights in the storage as height correction values, and uses inspection conditions including the image coordinate correction values saved in the storage and the height correction values to correct the image coordinates and height of the sample.