This book, the American edition of which was published in two handsome volumes by the Harpers, some little time ago, will perpetuate the fame of a woman of regal intellect and immense influence upon her times. In Byron’s judgment she was “the greatest woman in literature;” Macaulay called her “the greatest woman of her times;” and many others, whose opinions carry weight, could be quoted as giving her a foremost place among the worlds gifted women. The biography fills a want; for, while numerous pens have written of this woman, there has been before no adequate portrayal of her career. The author, Dr. Abel Stevens, whose reputation as a writer in history and biography is high and secure, has for some years been living in Switzerland, where he has enjoyed excellent facilities for the preparation of the work, “Madame De Staël, a Study of her Life and Times, the first Revolution and the first Empire.” The work is called, and in its completeness it will probably remain, the standard biography of this illustrious woman, and will need no successor. It shows great research and pains-taking, as well as a skilled literary hand. A complete, much-needed biography, it is more than this, it is a valuable history of that marvelous epoch in the annals of France. It is of great value for its sketches of other eminent persons, contemporaries of its subject, and for its intelligent narration of events as sensational as any ever witnessed upon the theater of Europe. Madame De Staël lived from 1766 to 1817. Her full maiden name was Anne Louise Germaine Necker. Her father was the great Necker, for a time Minister from Geneva at the French court, and afterward the powerful French Minister of Finance. Her mother was the daughter of a Swiss pastor, and a woman of beautiful person and fine accomplishments, with whom, while Mademoiselle Curchod, the historian Gibbon fell in love, and for whom he always cherished a tender regard. The love of Madame De Staël for her father approached idolatry, but for her mother was much less ardent. She was an only child, and received a careful training and the highest advantages. She was born and died in Paris, and this was the place always where she loved best to live, though for many years, through the persecutions of Napoleon, she was an exile from France. As a child she was very precocious; a girl in her mother’s _salon_, she astonished the people by the brilliancy of her conversation; she very early tried her hand at writing, and showed marked literary gifts; when fifteen years old, she had the maturity which might be looked for in a young woman of twenty-five. At the age of twenty she became the wife of Baron De Staël. The baron was thirty-seven. It was a marriage of _convenance_, such as in France were customary, and on her part, at least, there was no love. For a number of years they lived apart, but she went to the baron in his last illness and remained with him until his death.