D'Erfeuil considers the antiquities of Rome altogether overrated. He is not going to fatigue himself, he says, by toiling through all these old ruins. He makes his way northwards, but is as bored by Alpine scenery as he was by Rome. In the end he goes to England, where he assists Corinne in her misfortunes; his deeds have ever been nobler than his words. He cannot, however, when he sees how miserable her love for Oswald has made her, deny his vanity the satisfaction of ringing the changes upon "I told you so;" and he considers it a duty to himself not to let the opportunity slip of offering himself as Oswald's successor. For all this, it is true and unselfish devotion that he displays, and Corinne is distressed by her inability to be more truly grateful to him; but he is so careless and scatterbrained that she is constantly tempted to forget his generous deeds just as he himself forgets them. "It is very charming, no doubt," observes the authoress, "to set little value on one's own good deeds, but it may be that the indifference with which some men regard their own noble actions has its origin in their superficiality." Without regard for anything but what she considers the truth, she thus derives some of the most conspicuous virtues of her countrymen from weaknesses in their character. By means of this typical character of D'Erfeuil, Mme. de Staël shows how in France all good feelings are held in check by one vice, that fear of society which has its origin in vanity. It seems to her as if all feeling, the whole of life, indeed, were ruled by _esprit_, by the desire to appear to advantage, and by a fear which may be expressed in the words, "What will people say?" An author who writes not long after Mme. de Staël, the acute and original Henri Beyle, is of the same opinion. His name for Frenchmen is _les vainvifs_ and he asserts that all their actions are dictated by the consideration, _Qu'en dira-t-on_? the fear, that is to say, of the unbecoming or ridiculous. The French were then, what the Danes are still, very proud of their keen sense of the comical; it was this which led them to describe themselves modestly as the wittiest nation in the world. Corinne maintains that this sense of the ridiculous, with the corresponding fear of being ridiculous, destroys all originality in manners, in dress, and in speech, prevents all free play of imagination, and stifles natural expression of feeling. She maintains that feeling, that every kind of intellectuality, is obliged to take the form of wit instead of the form of poetry, in a country where the fear of becoming the victim of wit or mockery makes each man try to be the first to seize those weapons. "Are we," she asks D'Erfeuil, "only to live for what society may say of us? Is what others think and feel always to be our guiding star? If this be so, if we are intended to imitate each other for ever and ever, why has each one of us been given a soul? Providence might have spared itself