Schopenhauer pointed out that the French lack the _Gefühl für das Innige_—the tenderness and emotional depth which characterise the Germans and Italians. It is this that accounts for the inability of the French to appreciate Love, and for the fact that even vice is coarser in France than elsewhere, as remarked by Mr. Lecky, who, in his _History of European Morals_, contrasts “the coarse, cynical, ostentatious sensuality, which forms the most repulsive feature of the French character,” with “the dreamy, languid, and æsthetical sensuality of the Spaniard or Italian.” And it remained for the French to attempt to deify vice as in that over-rated and repulsive story of _Manon Lescaut_. Mme. de Staël, who suffered so much from the provincialism (_alias_ patriotism) of her countrymen, saw clearly the immorality of the French system of marrying girls without consulting their choice. Brandes relates the following anecdote of her: “One day, speaking of the unnaturalness of marriages arranged by the parents, as distinguished from those in which the young girls choose for themselves, she exclaimed, ‘I would _compel_ my daughter to marry the man of her choice!’” An attempt is being made at present in Paris to introduce the Anglo-American feminine spirit into society. The word _flirter_ has been adopted, and the thing itself experimented with. But the French girl does not know how to draw the line between coquetry and flirtation. She needs a better education before she can flirt properly. This education the Government is trying to give her at present; but it meets with stubborn resistance from the priests, and from the old notion that intellectual culture is fatal to feminine charms and the capacity for affection. If this book should accomplish nothing else than prove that without intellect there can be no deep Love, it will not have been written in vain. ITALIAN LOVE In Italy, in the sixteenth century, women were kept in as strict seclusion as to-day in France; and with the same results,—conjugal infidelity and a great lack of Personal Beauty, as noted by Montaigne, who remarks at the same time that it was regarded as something quite extraordinary if a young lady was seen in public. Byron wrote in 1817 that “Jealousy is not the order of the day in Venice”; and that the Italians “marry for their parents, and love for themselves.” In Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s _Life and Times of Titian_ we read that “Though chroniclers have left us to guess what the state of society may have been in Venice at the close of the fifteenth century, they give us reason to believe that it was deeply influenced by Oriental habit. The separation of men from women in churches, the long seclusion of unmarried females in convents or in the privacy of palaces, were but the precursors to marriages in which husbands were first allowed to see their wives as they came in state to dance round the wedding supper-table.”