[20] I must allude, but with reluctance, to another character, which I have heard likened to Juliet, and often quoted as the heroine _par excellence_ of amatory fiction--I mean the Julie of Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise; I protest against her altogether. As a creation of fancy the portrait is a compound of the most gross and glaring inconsistencies; as false and impossible to the reflecting and philosophical mind, as the fabled Syrens, Hamatryads and Centaurs to the eye of the anatomist. As a woman, Julie belongs neither to nature nor to artificial society; and if the pages of melting and dazzling eloquence in which Rousseau has garnished out his idol did not blind and intoxicate us, as the incense and the garlands did the votaries of Isis, we should be disgusted. Rousseau, having composed his Julie of the commonest clay of the earth, does not animate her with fire from heaven, but breathes his own spirit into her, and then calls the "impetticoated" paradox a _woman_. He makes her a peg on which to hang his own visions and sentiments--and what sentiments! but that I fear to soil my pages, I would pick out a few of them, and show the difference between this strange combination of youth and innocence, philosophy and pedantry, sophistical prudery, and detestable _grossierete_, and our own Juliet. No! if we seek a French Juliet, we must go far--far back to the real Heloise, to her eloquence, her sensibility, her fervor of passion, her devotedness of truth. She, at least, married the man she loved, and loved the man she married, and more than died for him; but enough of both. [21] Constant describes her beautifully--"Sa voix si douce au travers le bruit des armes, sa forme delicate au milieu de cet hommes tous couverts de fer, la purete de son ame opposee leurs calculs avides, son calme celeste qui contraste avec leurs agitations, remplissent le spectateur d'une emotion constante et melancolique, telle que ne la fait ressentir nulle tragedie ordinaire." [22] Coleridge--preface to Wallenstein. [23] In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona." [24] There is an allusion to this court language of love in "All Well that Ends Well," where Helena says,-- There shall your master have a thousand loves-- A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign; A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear, His humble ambition, proud humility, His jarring concord, and his discord dulcut, His faith, his sweet disaster, with a world Of pretty fond adoptious Christendoms That blinking Cupid gossips.--ACT I SCENE 1 The courtly poets of Elizabeth's time, who copied the Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, are full of these quaint conceits. [25] Since this was written, I have met with some remarks of a similar tendency in that most interesting book, "The Life of Lord E. Fitzgerald."