It would be an arrogant pretension for the nineteenth century to assert its superiority over its illustrious predecessors, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century, in all that concerns literature or art. However, we have had the good fortune and the honor to be witnesses of a wonderful display of creative genius in France in all branches of literature and art; we have seen orators, poets, artists who could take rank with the most illustrious chiefs of the ancient schools; all this splendor, all this national and peaceful glory, has only taken root in regular liberty and constitutional order. The troubles of the French Revolution, the violent and continual emotions of the war, above all the rule of an arbitrary will, which opened or shut at pleasure both lips and printing-presses, had not been propitious to the expansion of human thought under the reign of the Emperor Napoleon. Those who possessed a spark of the admirable gift of genius, preserved at the same time in their hearts that passion for liberty which necessarily ranked them among the enemies or suspected persons. At the height of his supreme power, Napoleon could never suffer independence either of thought or speech. He long persecuted Benjamin Constant after he had taken his place among the members of the Tribunate; and he manifested a persecuting aversion towards Madame de Staël, which betrayed that littleness of character often lying hid under a greatness of mind and views. When I turn over the table of contents of that immense correspondence of Napoleon which reveals the entire man in spite of the prudence of the editors, I find continually the name of Madame de Staël, joined to rigorous measures of spiteful epithets. "I write to the Minister of Police to finish with that mad Madame de Staël," he wrote on the 20th April, 1807, to the Count Regnault St. Jean d'Angely, who had apologized for his correspondence with the illustrious outlaw. "She is not to be suffered to leave Geneva, unless she wishes to go to a foreign country to write libels. Every day I obtain new proofs that no one can be worse than that women, enemy of the government and of France, without which she cannot live;" and several days previously he wrote to Fouché, "When I occupy myself with Madame de Staël, it is because I have the facts before me. That woman is a true bird of bad omen; she believes the tempest already arrived, and delights in intrigues and follies. Let her go to her Lake Leman. Have not the Genevans done us harm enough?"