“Ah, but,” they say, “Rousseau’s influence on the mind of Europe counted for so much in its changes of critical and creative taste.” _A la bonne heure!_ and I have recognised this, and shall recognise it in the proper places. But the agencies that bring about changes of critical and creative taste, proper to be mentioned, are not also as proper to be worked out here. Of such influences the capture of Constantinople is a famous and undoubted one. Was I bound to tell the story of Byzantine decadence, and the story of Mussulman progress? It has in innumerable instances, if not universally, influenced a man’s criticism, a man’s creation—whether he is in love at the time; whether he has arrived at that right and happy point, which Mr Thackeray would not call “a _pint_” in the drinking of good wine; whether he has been under the soothing influence of the Indian weed. Am I therefore bound to insert in this History a treatise on “Feminine Attraction,” a book on “The Wines of the World,” and an “Anti-Counterblast” to King James? In all seriousness, it may, I think, be requested once more of readers and of critics that they will “look at the bill of fare.” If the meat and the wine suit them, well and good; if not, are there not, in this particular instance, M. Texte and his hundred pages to make _quaere aliud diversorium_ no merely churlish or vindictive dismissal? While, as to such remarks as _are_ proper to be made here on the general critical temper and tendency of the Romantic movement, they were deliberately postponed in the last volume, and will find their proper place, not here, but in the Interchapters of the present. This indirect influence of Rousseau, with the direct influence of Diderot, no doubt cast a mighty leaven into the mind of France during the later decades of the eighteenth century; and it is noteworthy that, of the three remarkable writers with whom we shall next deal, while Madame de Staël directly and Chateaubriand indirectly express the first, Joubert was much in contact with Diderot during his youth. But the dominant criticism of the last twenty or five-and-twenty years of the century remained neo-classic; and we have accordingly dealt with it[175] in the last volume. Nay, the dominant criticism of the first twenty or so of the next abode in no very different state. Here we shall deal with what has not yet been handled of this half century, or nearly so, in France, isolating more or less the three great figures above mentioned, and dealing more in group with these “Empire Critics,” who in different ways reflect the transition to Romanticism. [Sidenote: _Madame de Staël._]