at the instance of Napoleon, who was by no means above resenting the hostility of a lady author.  But the Minister of Police, General Savary, assumed the responsibility of the affair; and to Mme. de Stael’s remonstrance he wrote in reply:  “It appeared to me that the air of this country did not agree with you, and we are not yet reduced to seek for models amongst the people you admire [the Germans].  Your last work is not French.”  It was not, accordingly, until 1813 that Mme. de Stael’s suppressed work on Germany saw the light.

The only passages in it that need engage our attention are those in which the author endeavours to interpret to a classical people the literature of a Gothic race.  In her chapter entitled “Of Classic and Romantic Poetry,” she says:  “The word romantic has been lately introduced in Germany to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songs of the troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of chivalry and Christianity.”  She mentions the comparison—­evidently derived from Schlegel’s lectures which she had attended—­of ancient poetry to sculpture and modern to painting; explains that the French incline towards classic poetry, and the English—­“the most illustrious of the Germanic nations”—­towards “that which owes its birth to chivalry and romance.”  “The English poets of our times, without entering into concert with the Germans, have adopted the same system.  Didactic poetry has given place to the fictions of the Middle Ages.”  She observes that simplicity and definiteness, that a certain corporeality and externality—­or what in modern critical dialect we would call objectivity—­are notes of antique art; while variety and shading of colour, and a habit of self-reflection developed by Christianity [subjectivity], are the marks of modern art.  “Simplicity in the arts would, among the moderns, easily degenerate into coldness and abstraction, while that of the ancients was full of life and animation.  Honour and love, valour and pity, were the sentiments which distinguished the Christianity of chivalrous ages; and those dispositions of the soul could only be displayed by dangers, exploits, love, misfortunes—­that romantic interest, in short, by which pictures are incessantly varied.”  Mme. de Stael’s analysis here does not go very deep, and her expression is lacking in precision; but her meaning will be obvious to those who have well considered the various definitions and expositions of these contrasted terms with which we set out.  Without deciding between the comparative merits of modern classic and romantic work, Mme. de Stael points out that the former must necessarily be imitative.  “The literature of the ancients is, among the moderns, a transplanted literature; that of chivalry and romance is indigenous. . . .  The literature of romance is alone capable of further improvement, because, being rooted in our own soil, that alone can continue to grow and acquire fresh