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 emigre, 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 aesthetics, 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 denoument 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 read because they were so long in coming to any clear notion of “what it was all about.”  Therefore so much argument as has been given seems allowable.

But we ought by this time to have laid sufficient foundation to make it not rash to erect a small superstructure of critical comment on the book now once more submitted to English readers.  Of that book I own that I was myself a good many years ago, and for a good many years, a harsh and even a rather unfair judge.  I do not know whether years have brought me the philosophic mind, or whether the book—­itself, as has been said, the offspring of middle-aged emotions—­appeals more directly to a middle-aged than to a young judgment.  To the young of its own time and the times immediately succeeding it appealed readily enough, and scarcely Byron himself (who was not a little influenced by it) had more to do with the Italomania of Europe in the second quarter of this century than Madame de Stael.