of her usual herd of lovers, courtiers, teachers, friends (to use whichever term, or combination of terms, the charitable reader pleases), A.W.  Schlegel, though it never could incline her innately unpoetical and unreligious mind to either poetry or religion, drove her towards aesthetics of one kind and another.  Lastly, the immense intellectual excitement of her visits to Weimar, Berlin, and Italy, added its stimulus to produce a fresh intellectual ferment in her.  On the purely intellectual side the result was De l’Allemagne, which does not concern us; on the side of feeling, tinged with aesthetic philosophy, of study of the archaic and the picturesque illuminated by emotion—­the result was Corinne.

If there had been only one difference between this and its author’s earlier attempt at novel-writing, that difference would have given Corinne a great advantage. Delphine had been irreverently described by Sydney Smith, when it appeared a few years earlier, as “this dismal trash which has nearly dislocated the jaws of every critic with gaping.”  The Whigs had not then taken up Madame de Stael, as they did afterwards, or it is quite certain that Mr Sydney would not have been allowed to exercise such Britannic frankness. Corinne met with gentler treatment from his friends, if not from himself.  Sir James Mackintosh, in particular, was full of the wildest enthusiasm about it, though he admitted that it was “full of faults so obvious as not to be worth mentioning.”  It must be granted to be in more than one, or two important points a very great advance on Delphine.  One is that the easy and illegitimate source of interest which is drawn upon in the earlier book is here quite neglected. Delphine presents the eternal French situation of the “triangle;” the line of Corinne is straight, and the only question is which pair of three points it is to unite in an honourable way.  A French biographer of Madame de Stael, who is not only an excellent critic and an extremely clever writer, but a historian of great weight and acuteness, M. Albert Sorel, has indeed admitted that both Leonce, the hero of Delphine, who will not make himself and his beloved happy because he has an objection to divorcing his wife, and Lord Nelvil, who refuses either to seduce or to marry the woman who loves him and whom he loves, are equal donkeys with a national difference.  Leonce is more of a “fool;” Lord Nelvil more of a “snob.”  It is something to find a Frenchman who will admit that any national characteristic is foolish:  I could have better reciprocated M. Sorel’s candour if he had used the word “prig” instead of “snob” of Lord Nelvil.  But indeed I have often suspected that Frenchmen confuse these two engaging attributes of the Britannic nature.