likely, according to the weaknesses of the poor but constant creature Human Nature, rather lead you to dispense with inquiry into the fact whether he, the individual Briton, Teuton, or Gaul, does really exhibit these characteristics. It will tempt you in the same way to exaggerate what tendencies he may have to them—to force them on him if he has them not—or even to leave him out of consideration if he is so impudent as too incontestably not to have them. And there is also the gravest possibility of doubt whether, even in themselves, they have sufficient truth to make them of more than the slightest value. After all, a man is a man before he is an Englishman or a Frenchman; it is scarcely too paradoxical to say that he is himself before he is even a man. The very greatest men of course carry this disconcerting triumph of individuality furthest; all but the very smallest help to flaunt its banner now and then. And when the hasty generaliser generalises still more hastily, and talks about Literature of the North and Literature of the South, the Rebellion of Fact is more inconvenient still. You lay it down that the literature of the North does not busy itself with frank youthful passion, and you have to settle matters with _Romeo and Juliet_; that the Italian is a light-hearted being whose only wants are sunshine, an olive or two, a flask of red wine with a wisp of tow in it, and a _donna leggiadra_, and there rises before you the _Divina Commedia_. [Sidenote: _And actual._] But this argument would tempt ourselves out of the way; and, even in so far as it is legitimate here at all, is rather for the Interchapters. Let it suffice that Madame de Staël is undoubtedly a notable figure in the mere History of Criticism, and that, like nearly all such figures, she has by no means lost her actual critical value; that she is no “shadow”; that she is still, dead as she is, a speaking voice of some of the perpetual forms and phases of criticism itself. That her intellectual ability, if only of the receptive and transmissive kind, was somewhat extraordinary, there can be little question. She frequently claims for herself the invention of the word “vulgarity”: and though she lived to be so unfortunate as to apply it[191] to Miss Austen—though it has perhaps been more misused than any other single word of criticism—it was needed. Nor was she herself much the dupe of words, though she often was of supposed ideas. She has somewhere quoted from Rousseau, and expanded, a wise protest against the requirement of a pedantic adherence to definition in terminology. It was unlucky for her, no doubt, that to some extent she came at, and could not but represent, one of those rather unsatisfactory transition periods which are neither quite one thing nor quite another. She has touches of classic “dignity” and of philosophic cant, harlequinned with others of Romantic _sehnsucht_ and “naturalistic” passion. Or rather she is like one of the