* * * * *

A Song of Jubilee and Other Poems contains some pretty, picturesque verses.  Its author is Mrs. De Courcy Laffan, who, under the name of Mrs. Leith Adams, is well known as a novelist and story writer.  The Jubilee Ode is quite as good as most of the Jubilee Odes have been, and some of the short poems are graceful.  This from The First Butterfly is pretty: 

   O little bird without a song!  I love
   Thy silent presence, floating in the light—­
   A living, perfect thing, when scarcely yet
   The snow-white blossom crawls along the wall,
   And not a daisy shows its star-like head
   Amid the grass.

Miss Bella Duffy’s Life of Madame de Stael forms part of that admirable ‘Eminent Women’ Series, which is so well edited by Mr. John H. Ingram.  There is nothing absolutely new in Miss Duffy’s book, but this was not to be expected.  Unpublished correspondence, that delight of the eager biographer, is not to be had in the case of Madame de Stael, the De Broglie family having either destroyed or successfully concealed all the papers which might have revealed any facts not already in the possession of the world.  Upon the other hand, the book has the excellent quality of condensation, and gives us in less than two hundred pages a very good picture of Madame de Stael and her day.  Miss Duffy’s criticism of Corinne is worth quoting: 

Corinne is a classic of which everybody is bound to speak with respect.  The enormous admiration which it exacted at the time of its appearance may seem somewhat strange in this year of grace; but then it must be remembered that Italy was not the over-written country it has since become.  Besides this, Madame de Stael was the most conspicuous personage of her day.  Except Chateaubriand, she had nobody to dispute with her the palm of literary glory in France.  Her exile, her literary circle, her courageous opinions, had kept the eyes of Europe fixed on her for years, so that any work from her pen was sure to excite the liveliest curiosity.

Corinne is a kind of glorified guide-book, with some of the qualities of a good novel.  It is very long winded, but the appetite of the age was robust in that respect, and the highly-strung emotions of the hero and heroine could not shock a taste which had been formed by the Sorrows of Werther.  It is extremely moral, deeply sentimental, and of a deadly earnestness—­three characteristics which could not fail to recommend it to a dreary and ponderous generation, the most deficient in taste that ever trod the earth.

But it is artistic in the sense that the interest is concentrated from first to last on the central figure, and the drama, such as it is, unfolds itself naturally from its starting point, which is the contrast between the characters of Oswald and Corinne.

The ’dreary and ponderous generation, the most deficient in taste that ever trod the earth,’ seems to me a somewhat exaggerated mode of expression, but ‘glorified guide-book’ is a not unfelicitous description of the novel that once thrilled Europe.  Miss Duffy sums up her opinion of Madame de Stael as a writer in the following passage: