The _Considerations on the French Revolution_ were published posthumously. According to Sainte Beuve, this is the finest of Madame de Staël’s works. “Her star,” he says, “rose in its full splendor only above her tomb.” It is difficult to pronounce any summary judgment on this book, which is partly biographical and partly historical. The first volume is principally devoted to a vindication of Necker; the second to an attack on Napoleon; the third to a study of the English Constitution and the applicability of its principles to France. The first two volumes alone were revised by the authoress before her death. We find in this work all Madame de Staël’s natural and surprising power of comprehension. She handles difficult political problems with an ease that would be more astonishing still, had the book more unity. As it is, each separate circumstance is related and explained admirably, but one is not made to reach the core of the stupendous event of which Europe still feels the vibration. Her portrait of Napoleon is unsurpassable for force and irony, for sarcasm and truth. All she possessed of epigrammatic power seems to have come unsought to enable her to avenge herself on the mean, great man who had feared her enough to exile and persecute her. In closing this rapid review of her works, one asks why was Madame de Staël not a greater writer? The answer is easy; she lacked high creative power and the sense of form. Her mind was strong of grasp and wide in range, but continuous effort fatigued it. She could strike out isolated sentences alternately brilliant, exhaustive and profound, but she could not link them to other sentences so as to form an organic page. Her thought was definite singly, but vague as a whole. She always saw things separately, and tried to unite them arbitrarily, and it is generally difficult to follow out any idea of hers from its origin to its end. Her thoughts are like pearls of price profusely scattered, or carelessly strung together, but not set in any design. On closing one of her books, the reader is left with no continuous impression. He has been dazzled and delighted, enlightened also by flashes; but the horizons disclosed have vanished again, and the outlook is enriched by no new vistas.