come unsought to enable her to avenge herself on the mean, great man who had feared her enough to exile and persecute her.
In closing this rapid review of her works, one asks why was Madame de Staël not a greater writer? The answer is easy; she lacked high creative power and the sense of form. Her mind was strong of grasp and wide in range, but continuous effort fatigued it. She could strike out isolated sentences alternately brilliant, exhaustive, and profound, but she could not link them to other sentences so as to form an organic page. Her thought was definite singly, but vague as a whole. She always saw things separately, and tried to unite them arbitrarily, and it is generally difficult to follow out any idea of hers from its origin to its end. Her thoughts are like pearls of price profusely scattered, or carelessly strung together, but not set in any design. On closing one of her books, the reader is left with no continuous impression. He has been dazzled and delighted, enlightened also by flashes; but the horizons disclosed have vanished again, and the outlook is enriched by no new vistas.
Then she was deficient in the higher qualities of imagination. She could analyse but not characterise; construct but not create. She could take one defect like selfishness, or one passion like love, and display its workings; or she could describe a whole character, like Napoleon's, with marvellous penetration; but she could not make her personages talk or act like human beings. She lacked pathos, and had no sense of humour. In short, hers was a mind endowed with enormous powers of comprehension, and an amazing richness of ideas, but deficient in perception of beauty, in poetry, and true originality. She was a great social
