The very early work on Rousseau is of course the most immature, and it meddles the least with purely literary criticism, but it is, for reasons obvious _à priori_, not the least interesting, and it is perhaps not the least satisfactory on acquaintance. The contrast between the modest (but not fairly to be called mock-modest) brevity of the original Preface, and the pomp and cant and claptrap of the second, twenty-six years later, may raise a sigh in amiable breasts. But the text, whether one agree or disagree with its sentiments and estimates, by no means lacks merit. The writer is well acquainted with the actual matter of discussion (which was by no means always the case with her later): she is in intelligent as well as emotional sympathy with it. She does not indeed take the purely literary side very strongly; she had her master’s own practice as warrant for not doing so. But her remarks (some of which are perhaps innocently borrowed from Longinus) on Rousseau’s style, and the inapplicability of the word “perfection” to it are not despicable: and the characterisations of the various works, though always tending to the moral and material side, are very far from negligible. It may be worth noting that while objecting, not without reason, to “les plaisanteries de Claire,”[178] she does not seem to know that they are only a corrupt following of Richardson. But the whole is a very fair _début_ in criticism, inclined as we should expect to the moral side, but not illegitimately so. [Sidenote: _The_ Essai sur les Fictions.] The _Essai sur les Fictions_, a sort of after-thought introduction to the three little stories, _Mirza_, _Adelaide et Théodore_, and _Pauline_, is a slight and rather curious defence of the novel of actual life moralised, as the most useful of fictitious or imitative writings, by means of a survey of such writings under three heads: “Marvellous and allegorical fictions,” “historical fictions,” and “natural fictions,” _i.e._ novels proper, where nothing is true, but everything _true-like_. The first two are very insufficiently treated, and her condemnation of the historical novel is deprived of all weight by the fact that she wrote too early to know any really good example of it. Perhaps the same may be said of the third. [Sidenote: _The_ De La Littérature.]