But if the painful historian were only left to his own hod-and-trowel work instead of having to draw the sword and don the helmet against metacritical raiders, his task would not be a difficult one. Madame de Staël, unlike her countryman and in some sort master, Rousseau, _is_ a critic, not merely indirectly, conjecturally, and by dint of the “must have,” but frankly, plainly, in honest straightforward deliverances _ad hoc_. The documents of her criticism are mainly four: the early _Letters_ on Rousseau himself, the later but still early _Essay on Fiction_, the famous _De La Littérature_, and the more famous _De l’Allemagne_. In all, but in increasing measure as they come, we see the curious and interesting development and production of a temperament originally no doubt possessing some masculine gifts of thought, as well as many feminine ones of feeling, excited and almost irritated to the highest activity by the word-fencing of the _philosophe_ salons, and presented with all the current doctrines or fancies in regard to literature and its precincts, by contact with the most active minds of Geneva, Paris, and Germany. With her half-masculine vigour and her wholly feminine receptivity, she absorbs and reproduces, _tant bien que mal_, all or a large part of the ideas which had been fermenting in all countries more or less, but especially in Germany, for the great part of a century,—French-Godwinian perfectibility, the æsthetic of Lessing and Winckelmann, the historical theories of Herder, as much as she could of the applied criticism of Goethe and Schiller and the Schlegels. Her different works show her of course at different stages of this influence. They show also—with equal necessity and undisguised by a system of explanatory and supplementary notes in the later editions—what actual knowledge of literature she had, what stock of material to expose and submit to all this complicated apparatus, all this varied range of reagency. [Sidenote: _The_ Lettres sur Rousseau.]