was here that she received the mixed but brilliant society which Byron declared reminded him of the grave, inasmuch as all distinctions were levelled in it!
These social meetings formed her protest against the enormous and overcrowded gatherings which were dignified then, as now, with the name of "society" in London, and where Madame de Staël found that all intellectual enjoyment was smothered by sheer force of numbers. She was willing enough to admit that clever men and women in England were transcendentally interesting when caught in sufficiently small groups to make rational conversation possible; but declared that all qualities of mind were annihilated in the crowds, where the only superiority necessary was physical force to enable one to elbow one's way along.
Byron and Madame de Staël became very good friends, although she rated him about his conduct in love; and he laughed, with quiet malice, at many of her peculiarities. One of his favourite diversions—or, at least, so he said—was to plague her by declaring that he did not believe in Napoleon's "persecutions." Nothing made her more angry, he declared, inasmuch as she was proud of the danger which, as she believed, threatened Napoleon's Government from her eloquence and her fame. Byron, in his Conversations with Lady Blessington, told one or two stories of "Corinne," more diverting probably than veracious, and complained of her overwhelming declamation (as distinguished from talk), her tendency to metaphysical subtleties, her extraordinary self-complacency, and the strange simplicity which caused her to be perpetually mystified. But he admitted that she was "a fine creature with great talent and many noble qualities";
