When Bonaparte came to Paris as a conqueror towards the end of 1797, after the campaign in Italy, he made an extraordinary impression upon Madame de Staël. She sought every opportunity of approaching him, felt herself alike attracted and overpowered by him. Whenever she tried to interest him, it seemed as if she were struck dumb, she, the incessant talker. The feeling of his unapproachableness tortured her. There is no doubt that for a short time she nourished the hope of becoming the friend of this Caesar, and it was a grievous disappointment to have to relinquish the idea. From the moment she did so, she joined the ranks of his political adversaries, continuing, however, for a time to display a sort of coquetry as far as he was personally concerned. Not till she was definitely repulsed, did her feeling change to pure hatred. In the book which she published in the intermediate stage, we have satirical allusions to Bonaparte's government along with flattering allusions to himself personally. In conversation she openly and constantly expressed her desire that he (and consequently the army of her country under his command) might suffer defeat, in order that a stop might be put to his tyranny. It was in the year 1800 that she published her first large book, _De la Littérature, considérée dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales_, a work which, from its general purport, must be classified as belonging to that great body of writings in which, ever since the days of the Renaissance, the relative merits of ancient and modern literature have been discussed. Chateaubriand dealt with the same problem very soon afterwards in his _Génie du Christianisme_. Mme. de Staël and he both declare themselves in favour of the modern literatures, but upon different grounds. He bases their superiority upon the fact that they deal with Christian themes, of which the ancient authors had no knowledge; Mme. de Staël bases it upon progressing civilisation. She believes in the capacity of humanity to improve, and in the gradual perfecting of social institutions, and on this belief grounds her assurance that literature will contain a steadily increasing treasure of experience and insight. At this stage of her development there is no question of any profound and systematic literary psychology; she calmly, for instance, excludes imagination from the list of faculties which are capable of development--why?--because in spite of all her enthusiasm for Ossian, she cannot deny that Homer's is the fuller, richer, poetry. The merit of her book, however, does not depend upon what it proves, but upon what it proclaims and urges, namely the necessity for a new literature, new science, and a new religion. She draws attention to the literatures of England and Germany, to the Icelandic sagas, and the old Scandinavian epics; but Ossian is to her the great type of all that is splendid in the poetry of the North. She loves his seriousness