Whereas Mme. de Staël's contemporaries lavishly praised the style of the book and the literary ability of its authoress, in order to be the better able to reprobate her views of life and her aims, the modern critic has little to say for the loose and diffuse style which the novel has in common with almost all others written in the form of letters; but, as regards the ideas of the book, they hold good to-day; they have actually not yet penetrated into all the countries of Europe, although the present century has striven to realise them ever more and more fully. The breach between society and the individual depicted in _Delphine_ is entirely in the spirit of the Emigrant Literature. The same bold revolt followed by the same despair in view of the uselessness of the struggle, is to be found throughout the whole group of writings. In the present case the revolt is a spirited, desperate attempt to hold fast one of the gains of the Revolution at the moment when it is being wrested away by the reaction. The despair is due to the sorrowful feeling that no remonstrance will avail, that the retrograde movement must run its course, must exceed all reasonable limits, before a better condition of things can be looked for. Was a woman's novel likely to prevail against an autocrat's compact with a Pope! The "war with society" which she depicts is less a conflict with the state or the law than with the jumble of conventions and beliefs, old and new, artificial and natural, reasonable and unreasonable, hurtful and beneficial, which, fused together into a cohesive and apparently homogeneous mass, constitute the stuff whereof public opinion is made. Just as the so-called sound common sense, which is always ready to set itself in opposition to any new philosophy, is at any given time to a great extent simply the congealed remains of a philosophy of earlier date, so the rules of society and the verdicts pronounced by society in accordance with these rules, verdicts always unfavourable in the case of new ideas, are to a great extent founded upon ideas which in their day had a hard struggle to assert themselves in face of the opposition of the then prevailing public opinion. That which was once an original, living idea, stiffens in time into the corpse of an idea. Social laws are universal laws, the same for all, and, like everything that is universal, they in numberless cases victimise. No matter how singular the individual may be, he is treated like every one else. The genius is in much the position of the clever head-boy in a stupid class; he has to listen to the same old lessons over and over again because of the dunces who have not learned them and yet must learn them. The verdict of society is an irresponsible verdict; while the judgments of the individual, as such, must always to a certain extent be a natural product, those of society are in most cases a manufactured article, provided wholesale by those whose business it is to concoct public