These social meetings formed her protest against the enormous and overcrowded gatherings which were dignified then, as now, with the name of “society” in London, and where Madame de Staël found that all intellectual enjoyment was smothered by sheer force of numbers. She was willing enough to admit that clever men and women in England were transcendentally interesting when caught in sufficiently small groups to make rational conversation possible; but declared that all qualities of mind were annihilated in the crowds, where the only superiority necessary was physical force to enable one to elbow one’s way along. Byron and Madame de Staël became very good friends, although she rated him about his conduct in love; and he laughed, with quiet malice, at many of her peculiarities. One of his favorite diversions—or, at least, so he said—was to plague her by declaring that he did not believe in Napoleon’s “persecutions.” Nothing made her more angry, he declared, inasmuch as she was proud of the danger, which, as she believed, threatened Napoleon’s Government from her eloquence and her fame. Byron, in his _Conversations with Lady Blessington_, told one or two stories of “Corinne,” more diverting probably than veracious, and complained of her overwhelming declamation (as distinguished from talk), her tendency to metaphysical subtleties, her extraordinary self-complacency, and the strange simplicity which caused her to be perpetually mystified. But he admitted that she was “a fine creature with great talent and many noble qualities”; and he loudly proclaimed her immeasurable superiority to every woman with pretensions to literary fame in England. He even found several things to admire in her appearance, which in a man of his taste was a very precious testimony, and might have consoled Madame de Staël, had she only known of it, for those personal defects which were said to afflict her. The person who in all England appears to have been the best match, conversationally, for Madame de Staël was Sir James Mackintosh, who, perhaps, gave the best of all descriptions of her when he said, “She is one of the few persons who surpass expectation. She has every sort of talent, and would be universally popular if, in society, she were to confine herself to her inferior talents—pleasantry, anecdote, and literature, which are so much more suited to conversation than her eloquence and genius.” At another time he remarked: “Her penetration was certainly extraordinary, with an air of apparent occupation in things immediately around her.” He recorded, not always approvingly, some of her sweeping judgments, as for instance, that “Political Economy was prosaic and uninteresting,” and that “Miss Austen’s novels were commonplace.”