[17] As I may have remarked elsewhere, they often seem to confuse it with "priggishness," "cant," and other amiable _cosas de Inglaterra_. (The late M. Jules Lemaitre, as Professor Ker reminds me, even gave the picturesque but quite inadequate description: "Le snob est un mouton de Panurge pretentieux, un mouton qui saute a la file, mais d'un air suffisant.") We cannot disclaim the general origin, but we may protest against confusion of the particular substance. [18] _Corinne, ou l'Italie._ [19] If anybody thinks _Wilhelm Meister_ or the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ a good novel, I am his very humble servant in begging to differ. Freytag's _Soll und Haben_ is perhaps the nearest approach; but, on English or French standards, it could only get a fair second class. [20] Corinne "walks and talks" (as the lady in the song was asked to do, but without requiring the offer of a blue silk gown) with her Oswald all over the churches and palaces and monuments of Rome, "doing" also Naples, Venice, etc. [21] She was rather proud of these mighty members: and some readers may recall that not least Heinesque remark of the poet who so much shocks Kaiser Wilhelm II., "Those of the Venus of Milo are not more beautiful." [22] Including also a third short story, _Le Dernier Abencerage_, which belongs, constructively, rather to the _Voyages_. It is in a way the liveliest (at least the most "incidented") of all, but not the most interesting, and with very little _temporal_ colour, though some local. It may, however, be taken as another proof of Chateaubriand's importance in the germinal way, for it starts the Romantic interest in Spanish things. The contrast with the dirty rubbish of Pigault-Lebrun's _La Folie Espagnole_ is also not negligible. [23] For the mother, in a fashion which the good Father-missionary most righteously and indignantly denounces as unchristian, had staked her own salvation on her daughter's obedience to the vow. [24] Its author, in the _Memoires d'Outre-Tombe_, expressed a warm wish that he had never written it, and hearty disgust at its puling admirers and imitators. This has been set down to hypocritical insincerity or the sourness of age: I see neither in it. It ought perhaps to be said that he "cut" a good deal of the original version. The confession of Amelie was at first less abrupt and so less effective, but the newer form does not seem to me to better the state of Rene himself. [25] There had been a very early French imitation of _Werther_ itself (of the end especially), _Les dernieres aventures du sieur d'Olban_, by a certain Ramond, published in 1777, only three years after Goethe. It had a great influence on Ch. Nodier (_v. inf._), who actually republished the thing in 1829.