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.

The faults of the novel indeed are those which impress themselves (as
Mackintosh, we have seen, allowed) immediately and perhaps excessively.
M. Sorel observes of its companion sententiously but truly, "Si le style
de _Delphine_ semble vieilli, c'est qu'il a été jeune." If not merely
the style but the sentiment, the whole properties and the whole stage
management of _Corinne_ seem out of date now, it is only because they
were up to date then. It is easy to laugh--not perhaps very easy to
abstain from laughing--at the "schall" twisted in Corinne's hair, where
even contemporaries mocked the hideous turban with which Madame de Stael
chose to bedizen her not too beautiful head; at Nelvil's inky cloak; at
the putting out of the fire; at the queer stilted half-Ossianic,
half-German rants put in the poetess's mouth; at the endless mingling of
gallantry and pedantry; at the hesitations of Nelvil; at the agonies of
Corinne. When French critics tell us that as they allow the
good-humoured satire on the Count d'Erfeuil to be just, we ought to do
the same in reference to the "cant Britannique" of Nelvil and of the
Edgermond circle, we can only respectfully answer that we should not
presume to dispute their judgment in the first case, but that they
really must leave us to ours in the second. As a matter of fact, Madame
de Stael's goody English characters, are rather like Miss Edgeworth's
naughty French ones in _Leonora_ and elsewhere--clever generalisations
from a little observation and a great deal of preconceived idea, not
studies from the life.

But this (and a great deal more that might be said if it were not
something like petty treason in an introduction-writer thus to play the