But we ought by this time to have laid sufficient foundation to make it not rash to erect a small superstructure of critical comment on the book now once more submitted to English readers. Of that book I own that I was myself a good many years ago, and for a good many years, a harsh and even a rather unfair judge. I do not know whether years have brought me the philosophic mind, or whether the book--itself, as has been said, the offspring of middle-aged emotions--appeals more directly to a middle-aged than to a young judgment. To the young of its own time and the times immediately succeeding it appealed readily enough, and scarcely Byron himself (who was not a little influenced by it) had more to do with the Italomania of Europe in the second quarter of this century than Madame de Stael. The faults of the novel indeed are those which impress themselves (as Mackintosh, we have seen, allowed) immediately and perhaps excessively. M. Sorel observes of its companion sententiously but truly, "Si le style de _Delphine_ semble vieilli, c'est qu'il a ete jeune." If not merely the style but the sentiment, the whole properties and the whole stage management of _Corinne_ seem out of date now, it is only because they were up to date then. It is easy to laugh--not perhaps very easy to abstain from laughing--at the "schall" twisted in Corinne's hair, where even contemporaries mocked the hideous turban with which Madame de Stael chose to bedizen her not too beautiful head; at Nelvil's inky cloak; at the putting out of the fire; at the queer stilted half-Ossianic, half-German rants put in the poetess's mouth; at the endless mingling of gallantry and pedantry; at the hesitations of Nelvil; at the agonies of Corinne. When French critics tell us that as they allow the good-humoured satire on the Count d'Erfeuil to be just, we ought to do the same in reference to the "cant Britannique" of Nelvil and of the Edgermond circle, we can only respectfully answer that we should not presume to dispute their judgment in the first case, but that they really must leave us to ours in the second. As a matter of fact, Madame de Stael's goody English characters, are rather like Miss Edgeworth's naughty French ones in _Leonora_ and elsewhere--clever generalisations from a little observation and a great deal of preconceived idea, not studies from the life.