He found her, of all mortals within his experience, “the most gesticulative, combative, and talkative,” even while admitting that she was almost the most cultivated and intellectual of women. But he declared that she destroyed all poetry in him, and waxed plaintive once again over his ineffectual struggles with French. He proclaimed that not to admire her for her fine mind and liberality of sentiment was impossible; and he breathed a sigh of the most unfeigned relief when she departed. All the Court personages felt that they had been having a severe time of it; although the bright and petulant Duchess Amelia was enchanted in the first instance, and wrote to Goethe imploring him to come and study the phenomenon. He resisted for a long while, but finally arrived—not without a previous sneer or two. Madame de Staël was charmed to know him—in fact, her days in Weimar passed in a perfect effervescence of delight. While the Germans were coldly, sometimes rather snarlingly, criticizing her, she was admiring them. Schiller she speaks of with the liveliest enthusiasm. Their acquaintance began with an animated discussion on the respective merits of French and foreign dramas. Madame de Staël maintained that Corneille and Racine were unsurpassable. Schiller, of course, differed; and managed to make her heed his reasons, in spite of his difficulty in speaking French. His quiet simplicity and earnestness, as well as his originality of mind, became instantly manifest to the illustrious stranger. With her, admiration meant always the most ungrudging friendship; and this was the sentiment with which Schiller inspired her for the rest of his days. Goethe she found cold, and she was characteristically disappointed at his no longer displaying the passionate ardor of Werther “Time has rendered him a spectator,” she says; yet she admits the universality of his mind and his prodigious information when once prevailed on to talk. It is provoking to think that she never saw the best of Goethe, and that this disappointing result was—although she was far, indeed, from guessing it—her own fault chiefly; for she informed the poet that she intended to print his conversation, and of this Goethe had a horror. He states as much in a letter to Schiller, and gives as his reason the sorry figure which Rousseau had cut in his correspondence—just then published—with Madame de la Tour Franqueville and her friend.