her own accord she would hardly open her window to gaze on the bay of Naples, while she would go a hundred miles to converse with a new mind.
Its defects admitted, we may own that Madame de Staël's work contains many charming chapters. If, true to her theory, she provokes her reader by preferring the Latin poets to the Greek ones, and Quintilian to Cicero, simply because of their later date; if she persists, rather than modify her views, that the sterile scholasticism of the Middle Ages was not a real retrogression, and strangely overlooks, in her admiration for Christianity, the intellectual benefits which man owes to the Arabs; on the other hand, she has flashes of admirable insight. invasion of Italy by the barbarians, and the part played by Christianity in fusing the two races, is very suggestive. But, unfortunately, it is suggestive only, and sins by a sketchiness which, more or less, mars the whole book. This was one of Madame de Staël's defects. She abounded in ideas, but failed either in the power or the patience to work them out.
Two other interesting chapters are those on the "Grace, Gaiety, and Taste of the French Nation," and on "Literature in the Reign of Louis XIV." The peculiar social influences which, among successive generations of courtiers, produced the best writers of France, are very happily described; but here again the conclusions are indicated rather than developed. Madame de Staël stated her conviction that the palmy days of French wit were over, and that the literature of the future, if it wished to flourish, must invest itself with greater gravity.
Convinced that the moment had come for the dramatist to pack up his puppet-show and despatch it to a
