perhaps whom she ever really loved, but, unluckily, a man whom it was by no means good to love. For some years she oscillated contentedly enough between Coppet and Paris. But the return of Bonaparte from Egypt was unlucky for her. Her boundless ambition, which, with her love of society, was her strongest passion, made her conceive the idea of fascinating him, and through him ruling the world. Napoleon, to use familiar English, "did not see it." When he liked women he liked them pretty and feminine; he had not the faintest idea of admitting any kind of partner in his glory; he had no literary taste; and not only did Madame de Stael herself meddle with politics, but her friend, Constant, under the Consulate, chose to give himself airs of opposition in the English sense. Moreover, she still wrote, and Bonaparte disliked and dreaded everyone who wrote with any freedom. Her book, De la Littérature, in 1800, was taken as a covert attack on the Napoleonic régime; her father shortly after republished another on finance and politics, which was disliked; and the success of Delphine, in 1803, put the finishing touch to the petty hatred of any kind of rival superiority which distinguished the Corsican more than any other man of equal genius. Madame de Stael was ordered not to approach within forty leagues of Paris, and this exile, with little softening and some excesses of rigour, lasted till the return of the Bourbons.

Then it was that the German and Italian journeys already mentioned (the death of M. Necker happening between them and recalling his daughter from the first) led to the writing of Corinne.

A very few words before we turn to the consideration of the book, as a book and by itself, may appropriately finish all that need be said here about the author's life. After the publication of Corinne she returned to Germany, and completed the observation which she thought necessary for the companion book De l'Allemagne. Its publication in 1810, when she had foolishly kindled afresh the Emperor's jealousy by appearing with her usual "tail" of worshippers or parasites as near Paris as she was permitted, completed her disgrace. She was ordered back to Coppet: her book was seized and destroyed. Then Albert de Rocca, a youth of twenty-three, who had seen some service, made his appearance at Geneva. Early in 1811, Madame de Stael, now aged forty-five, married him secretly. She was, or thought herself, more and more persecuted by Napoleon; she feared that Rocca might be ordered off on active duty, and she fled first to Vienna, then to St Petersburg, then to Stockholm, and so to England. Here she was received with ostentatious welcome and praises by the Whigs; with politeness by everybody; with more or less concealed terror by the best people, who found her rhapsodies and her political dissertations equally boring. Here too she was unlucky enough to express the opinion that Miss Austen's books were vulgar. The fall of Napoleon brought her back to Paris; and after the vicissitudes of 1814-15, enabled her to establish herself there for the short remainder of her life, with the interruption only of visits to Coppet and to Italy. She died on the 13th July 1817: her two last works, Dix Années d'Exil and the posthumous Considérations sur La Révolution Française, being admittedly of considerable interest, and not despicable even by those who do not think highly of her political talents.

And now to Corinne, unhampered and perhaps a little helped by this survey of its author's character, career, and compositions. The heterogeneous nature of its plan can escape no reader long; and indeed is pretty frankly confessed by its title. It is a love story doubled with a guide-book: an eighteenth-century romance of "sensibility" blended with a transition or even nineteenth-century diatribe of æsthetics and "culture." If only the first of these two labels were applicable to it, its case would perhaps be something more gracious than it is; for there are more unfavourable situations for cultivating the affections, than in connection with the contemplation of the great works of art and nature, and it is possible to imagine many more disagreeable ciceroni than a lover of whichever sex. But Corinne and Nelvil (whom our contemporary translator[1] has endeavoured to acclimatise a little more by Anglicising his name further to Nelville), do not content themselves with making love in the congenial neighbourhoods of Tiber or Pœstum, or in the stimulating presence of the masterpieces of modern and ancient art. A purpose, and a double purpose, it might almost be said, animates the book. It aims at displaying "sensibility so charming"—the strange artificial eighteenth-century conception of love which is neither exactly flirtation nor exactly passion, which sets convention at defiance, but retains its own code of morality; at exhibiting the national differences, as Madame de Stael conceived them, of the English and French and Italian temperaments; and at preaching the new cult of æsthetics whereof Lessing and Winckelmann, Gœthe, and Schlegel, were in different ways and degrees the apostles. And it seems to have been generally admitted, even by the most fervent admirers of Madame de Stael and of Corinne itself, that the first purpose has not had quite fair play with the other two. "A little thin," they confess of the story. In truth it could hardly be thinner, though the author has laid under contribution an at least ample share of the improbabilities and coincidences of romance.

Nelvil, an English-Scottish peer who has lost his father, who accuses himself of disobedience and ingratitude to that father, and who has been grievously jilted by a Frenchwoman, arrives in Italy in a large black cloak, the deepest melancholy, and the company of a sprightly though penniless French émigré, the Count d'Erfeuil. After performing prodigies of valour in a fire at Ancona, he reaches Rome just when a beautiful and mysterious poetess, the delight of Roman society, is being crowned on the Capitol. The only name she is known by is Corinne. The pair are soon introduced by the mercurial Erfeuil, and promptly fall in love with each other, Corinne seeking partly to fix her hold on Nelvil, partly to remove his Britannic contempt for Italy and the Italians, by guiding him to all the great spectacles of Rome and indeed of the country generally, and by explaining to him at great length what she understands of the general theory of æsthetics, of Italian history, and of the contrasted character of the chief European nations. Nelvil on his side is distracted between the influence of the beauty, genius, and evident passion of Corinne, and his English prejudices; while the situation is further complicated by the regulation discovery that Corinne, though born in Italy of an Italian mother, is, strictly speaking, his own compatriot, being the elder and lawful daughter of a British peer, Lord Edgermond, his father's closest friend. Nay more, he had always been destined to wed this very girl; and it was only after her father's second marriage with an Englishwoman that the younger and wholly English daughter, Lucile, was substituted in the paternal schemes as his destined spouse. He hears, on the other hand, how Corinne had visited her fatherland and her step-mother, how she had found both intolerable, and how she had in a modified and decent degree "thrown her cap over the mill" by returning to Italy to live an independent life as a poetess, an improvisatrice, and, at least in private, an actress.

It is not necessary to supply fuller argument of the text which follows, and of which, when the reader has got this length, he is not likely to let the dénoûment escape him. But the action of Corinne gets rather slowly under weigh; and I have known those who complained that they found the book hard to