Art, indeed, offering, by its early maturity, an awkward contradiction to her system, she proceeded to get rid of it by describing it as the product of imagination rather than of thought, and by adding that its plastic and sensuous qualities rendered it capable of flourishing under systems of government which necessarily crush every other form of intellectual activity. To prove the perfectibility of the human mind, she then had but poetry and philosophy. To the latter she assigned the really glorious future, while the former she regarded as finished. She was the first of the Romanticists, in the sense that she preferred the poetry of the north to that of the south; and her predilections in this line carried her so far, that she placed Ossian above Homer. She considered that the early forms of poetry—in other words, mere transcripts of material impressions—were superior to those later creations in which sentiment enters as an element. And this idea, which seems at first a contradiction to her theory of perfectibility, was really intended to confirm it. For, in her view, the value of literature consisting exclusively in the amount of thought that it contained, introspective poetry became a mere bridge which the mind traversed on its way to wider horizons. Madame de Staël was not only not a poet herself, but she was incapable of appreciating the higher forms of poetry. In her excursions through the regions of literature, she was always in pursuit of some theory which would reconcile the contradictions of human destiny. Man, regarded as socially perfectible, being her ideal, she was in haste to classify and relegate to some convenient limbo the portions of a subject which did not directly contribute to her hypotheses. Having disposed, therefore, of poetry and art, she undertook to consider literature from the point of view of psychology. She was only pleased with it when self-conscious and analytical. Dante probably perplexed her, and she evoked to condemn him the perruqued shade of “Le Goût.” Shakespeare she applauded, as might be expected, chiefly in consideration of _Hamlet_; while Petrarch pleased her principally because he was harmonious; and Ariosto because he was fanciful. The true significance of the Renaissance escaped her. She sought for the origin of each literature in the political and religious institutions of the country where it arose, instead of regarding both literature and social conditions as simultaneous products of the national mind. Her erudition was inadequate to her task, and the purpose of her works, by warping her judgments, contributed to make them superficial. While pronouncing the English and French drama to be essentially superior to the Greek, she characteristically preferred Euripides to his two mighty predecessors. The grandeur of the dominant idea of Greek tragedy—that of an inevitable destiny, against which man struggles in vain—appears to have escaped her altogether. This is not surprising,