since such a conception was entirely opposed to her own order of mind and to the age in which she lived. The root of all the social theories then prevailing was the value of the individual. Man was not a puppet of the gods, but the architect of his own fate. To lose hold of ideal virtue was to become incapable of governing or being governed; and ideal virtue was a definite entity which anybody might possess who chose. This—rather crudely stated—was Madame de Staël’s point of view. Her enthusiasm rejected all idea of limited responsibilities. The ethical value of the Æschylean trilogy—the awful sense of overhanging doom which pervades it—did not appeal to her, because it tended to the annihilation of the struggling soul. In other words, she liked _self-conscious_ drama, and was attracted to Euripides by his creation of artificial situations, in which interesting personages had room and leisure to explain themselves. With Aristophanes she was frankly disgusted; from her didactic standpoint, because of his pronounced indecency; and on artistic grounds, because he attacked living individuals instead of creating characters like Tartufe and Falstaff. To his beauties she remained entirely blind, and this, perhaps, is to be explained by her deficiency in the æsthetic faculty. It is said that Châteaubriand first taught her to appreciate nature, and Schlegel to perceive the loveliness of art. Chênedollé complained that she had lived for years opposite Lake Leman “without finding an image” in regard to it; and she herself once frankly admitted that of her own accord she would hardly open her window to gaze on the bay of Naples, while she would go a hundred miles to converse with a new mind. Its defects admitted, we may own that Madame de Staël’s work contains many charming chapters. If, true to her theory, she provokes her reader by preferring the Latin poets to the Greek ones, and Quintilian to Cicero, simply because of their later date; if she persists, rather than modify her views, that the sterile scholasticism of the Middle Ages was not a real retrogression, and strangely overlooks, in her admiration for Christianity, the intellectual benefits which man owes to the Arabs; on the other hand, she has flashes of admirable insight. The chapter on the invasion of Italy by the barbarians, and the part played by Christianity in fusing the two races, is very suggestive. But, unfortunately, it is suggestive _only_, and sins by a sketchiness which, more or less, mars the whole book. This was one of Madame de Staël’s defects. She abounded in ideas, but failed either in the power or the patience to work them out.