and he loudly proclaimed her immeasurable superiority to every woman with pretensions to literary fame in England. He even found several things to admire in her appearance, which in a man of his taste was a very precious testimony, and might have consoled Madame de Staël, had she only known of it, for those personal defects which were said to afflict her.
The person who in all England appears to have been the best match, conversationally, for Madame de Staël was Sir James Mackintosh, who, perhaps, gave the best of all descriptions of her when he said, "She is one of the few persons who surpass expectation. She has every sort of talent, and would be universally popular if, in society, she were to confine herself to her inferior talents—pleasantry, anecdote, and literature, which are so much more suited to conversation than her eloquence and genius." At another time he remarked: "Her penetration was certainly extraordinary, with an air of apparent occupation in things immediately around her." He recorded, not always approvingly, some of her sweeping judgments, as, for instance, that "Political Economy was prosaic and uninteresting," and that "Miss Austen's novels were commonplace."
Her stay in England was saddened, although apparently not very deeply so, by the violent death of her younger son. Byron's flippant allusion to this tragic event has brought him into much disrepute. "Madame de Staël," he wrote, "has lost one of her young Barons, who has been carbonaded by a vile Teutonic adjutant. . . . 'Corinne' is, of course, what all mothers must be, but will, I venture to prophesy, do what few mothers could—write an essay upon it. She cannot exist without a grievance and somebody to see or read
