The _Rousseau_, however, is but the work of a novice, and the _Sur Les Fictions_ is still something of an essay-piece: yet in both one may observe a _nisus_ towards large generalising, which was the natural result of the author’s time, temperament, and education. This _nisus_ turns into a full spread of wing in _De La Littérature_, published as the centuries met, and when the author was four and thirty. Its avowed central principle is a transformed “Modernism,”—the application of the favourite _philosophe_ doctrine of perfectibility to literature, with an inflexible determination that though Greek literature may be better than anything before it, Roman shall be better than Greek, and (though there is _hiatus valde lacrimabilis_ about mediæval), that modern literature shall be greater than either. To those who are not pure “ideologists,” and who do not think that an ounce of generalisation, however silly, however demonstrably false, is better than a ton of sober consideration and array of fact, this theory condemns itself at once. Here, at any rate, we may legitimately echo Mr Burchell and his “Fudge!” Yet Corinne’s attempts to prove it are interesting, and would be more so, if she had had skill enough to hide her ignorance of the facts themselves, or knowledge enough of them to gild her paradox. Her actual method is not merely characteristic of time and person, but has a certain ingenuity: indeed, it no doubt deceived herself. She will not take literature _per se_, but she takes it in its relations with “virtue,” “glory,” “liberty,” “happiness,” first in the abstract, and then under these categories as illustrated by Greek, Roman, “Northern,” “Southern,” and individual national literatures, paying special attention to English, and defending it from the objections of French eighteenth-century critics. It is, of course, easy to see how, by showing, or trying to show, that virtue, &c., is, _according to her_, better displayed in literature as it goes on, she proves, or attempts to prove, her general point.