[Footnote 12: In regard to Madame de Stael, it is proper to remark, that although certainly an able metaphysician--perhaps the very ablest that has ever appeared of her sex--yet you see throughout her writings the character of the woman. Her isolated aphorisms and maxims are most splendid; but when you come to examine any one of her productions as a whole, you see the want of system and complete connection between the parts. Her descriptions of our emotions and feelings are almost unrivalled for pathos and beauty; but when she would put together the different parts of the mind, and sketch out a heroine or a hero--a _Corinne_ or her _lover_--she presents incongruous beings such as nature never produces. Her mind, after all, was but the mind of a woman--a mind that could furnish the very best materials in the world for a philosopher to weave into his systems--a mind too susceptible of emotion to philosophize on abstract principles--a mind that relied on feeling, rather than reason, to guide it to truth. In her work on the French Revolution, though certainly very able, you see how her mind is warped by her affection for her father, (M. Necker.) You see how her conceptions of the Revolution as a whole, are biassed and prejudiced by too intense a consideration of the scenes and events transpiring immediately around her, and concerning her family. Goethe seems to think that Madame de Stael had no idea what duty meant, so completely was she a creature of feeling.] Having described three distinct and separate orders of mind, remarkable for different kinds of associations, and all widely differing in the possession of that information suited to social converse, I come now to compare the sexes together, in relation to the second point essential to conversation, the power of communicating our knowledge pleasantly and attractively to others. He undoubtedly is the most pleasing companion in the social circle whose mind is of that capacious, well stored kind that is capable of ranging at will through the various classes of associations just pointed out, giving you at one time connections and relations of abstract principles, or philosophical deductions--at another, of analogies between objects, effects, and emotions--and at another, interesting and circumstantial details of the common events of every day life. "Conversation," says a modern writer, "may be compared to a lyre with seven chords--philosophy, art, poetry, politics, love, scandal, and the weather. There are some professors who, like Paganini, 'can discourse most eloquent music' upon one string only, and some who can grasp the whole instrument, and with a master's hand, sound it from the top to the bottom of its compass." Such individuals as these are very rare. Perhaps Dr. Johnson,[13] McIntosh and Coleridge might be cited as specimens in England, and Schlegel in Germany. Individuals of this character are very rare, because in the first place, there are very