dear sir, it is an antique; no living artist in Europe can equal it." 'Prior's Burke, vol. ii. p. 177.

Frivolity is no less characteristic of Madame's own performance than vanity. She went to a fishing party at Genlis, shortly after her marriage, in white embroidered shoes; which drew upon her the epithet of a 'belle dame de Paris.' This reproach stung her; and the mode she took to efface it was as follows: 'Je me penche, je ramasse un petit poisson long comme le doigt, et je l'avale tout entier, en disant: " Voyez comme je suis une belle dame de Paris." J'ai fait d'autres folies dans ma vie, mais certainement je n'ai jamais rien fait d'aussi bizarre. Tout le monde fut confondu. M. de G. me gronda beaucoup, et me fit peur en disant que ce poisson pourroit vivre, et grossir dans mon estomac, frayeur que je conservai pendant plusieurs mois.'

Absurdity cannot go much beyond this. When M. de Genlis went to join his regiment at Nancy, she retired into the convent of Origny, there to spend the time of his absence.

'Je pleurai beaucoup en me séparant de M. de Genlis; ensuite je m'amusai infiniment.' Je m'y plaisois; je jouois de la harpe, je chantois des motets dans la tribune de l'église, et je faisois des espiègleries aux religieuses.'

Another of her exploits was this:

'Il prit à mon frère une gaieté; il frappa contre les vîtres (of the wine shops in a village where they were) en criant," Bonnes gens, vendezvous du sacré chien?" et après cet exploit il m'entraîna en courant dans une petite ruelle obscure, à côté de ces cabarets, où nous nous cachames en mourant de rire. Notre joie s'augmentoit encore en entendant le cabaretier, sur le pas de sa porte, menacer de coups de gourdin les polissons qui avoient frappé aux vîtres. Mon frère m'expliqua que sacré chien vouloit dire de l'eau de vie. Nous répétames plusieurs fois cette agréable plaisanterie, nous disputant à qui diroit sacré chien, et finissant par le dire en duo, et toujours à chaque fois nous sauvant à toutes jambes dans la petite ruelle, où nous faisions des rire à tomber par terre. Heureux l'age où on est transporté d'aise à si bon marché, quand rien n'a encore exalté l'imagination et troublé le cœur.'

Would our readers suppose that this was written by a female philosopher, married, and on the eve of becoming a mother? There was at Genlis a bathing tub large enough to hold four persons. She had it filled with milk collected from all the neighbouring farms, and, with her sister-in-law, she went into it when thus filled. She represents it as the most agreeable thing in the world. 'Nous avions fait couvrir la surface du bain de feuilles de roses, et nous restames plus de deux heures dans ce charmant bain.'

She seems at every period of her life to have been particularly fond of bonbons and patisserie; and indeed of eating in general. She once made a poor man weep bitterly by devouring the whole liver of a fish, without offering him any of it. The Duke of

Orleans,

Orleans, (Philippe Egalité) enamoured of her aunt, sought to make the niece propitious, and took her some barley-sugar, which, as she avows, put her in perfect good humour. She frequently mentions presents of this kind; but her most rapturous exclamations are upon the following occasion. On January 1st, 1825, the Duke of Orleans, formerly her pupil, sent her, as a new year's present, a thing in the form of a large log of wood, hollow, made of pasteboard, and containing bonbons. On this log she made some verses, expressing her astonishment that Monseigneur should approach her armed with a club to knock her down; she suspects, however, that the club is but a trick, and discovering at length that it contains des douceurs,' she cries out, 'O surprise! O ravissenient!' and receives with delight the gift equally sweet to age, to maturity, and to childhood. But we must conclude these trifling matters; we only request the reader to inspect a few pages of the original, in order that he may be convinced of the moderation which we have shown toward our authoress.

In all that we have been quoting, it is difficult to find any trace of the life or writings of a literary character; or to suspect that the author cited is the most voluminous female novelist of this, or perhaps of any age; that she stands high among the ladies of her country who have enriched it by their imagination; and that that country claims pre-eminence in all that is refined and graceful in intellect. Certainly, did the biographer not take most special care to make us acquainted with her various labours, and to let us know the value which the public set upon them, we never should have guessed that she had composed the Théâtre d'Education,' 'les Vœux téméraires,'' les Chevaliers du Cigne,' &c. &c. —that she had ever produced any thing which could outlive the hour that gave it being.

That-except in her Memoirs-Madame de Genlis is a novelist of great fire and animation, of considerable truth and invention—that she has the talent of carrying her readers with interest through her pages-is most certain. Certain it is that whatever she paints of human actions and passions, she paints with minuteness and accuracy; and that, in all the details of description, she is exact and exuberant. But praise ends here. We must not look for merit of a higher order in any of her productions. We must not expect to find her creating new forms, transfusing souls into bodies that become animated by her touch, or taking any of the large views of nature which bespeak true genius. In the smaller intellectual faculties, as the perception of facts, the arrangement of incidents-in all that is necessary to catch some happy glimpses of manners-she is eminently rich; but not in those which compare, combine, and follow up the greater relations that join effects to causes. If we may be allowed thus

to

to express ourselves, we should say Madame de Genlis has a very large portion of a very small mind, and that portion is particularly active. Her intellectual arsenal is boundlessly stored with sparrow-shot.

With such endowments Madame de Genlis is fully adequate to write what she has published; there is nothing in the very best of her novels which demands greater powers than these. That, when she criticises works, which, like her own, are the offspring of petty faculties, she may find them commensurate to her ideas of excellence, is therefore natural; and we were not surprized at the praises bestowed by her in this piece of auto-biography upon the most insipid of the dead, Madame Deshoulières, and upon the most narrow-minded and prejudiced of the living, Monsieur de Bonald. For the same reasons we were not astonished when we read her remarks upon authors of different dimensions from these, and found her utterly incapable of appreciating such minds as Byron and Scott; or their Gallic imitator Lamartine; or deciding, in direct opposition to the received opinion, upon the merits of Gibbon as an historian. Her favourite M. de Bonald is the author of several works, principally political, the most remarkable of which is that entitled Législation Primitive.' Another is Théorie du Pouvoir Politique et Religieux;' and his last, a pamphlet, just published, on the liberty of the press. M. de Bonald is the champion and the hero of that party in France which would put a stop to the progress of mankind, and bring back the world to the very spot on which it stood half a century ago. We certainly are not partisans of the means which his countrymen have devised for the improvement of the species, and the promotion of freedom; and we differ from them entirely in their estimation of good and bad, political as well as moral. But we cannot go quite so far as this author does, and indiscriminately wish undone every thing that has been done, even in the period of their most violent confusion. M. de Bonald has some power of language, and can turn a few periods with plausibility. But better were it to have no discourse of reason, than to think as he does think:-We quote a single phrase from his last pamphlet.

'Je cherche de très bonne foi les avantages de la liberté de la presse, et je ne les apperçois pas.'

With regard to M. Lamartine, we are far from saying that, even to minds accustomed to the boldest strains of English poetry, his productions can appear devoid of faults. Still more must his innovations in thought and language make him appear extravagant, and even barbarous, to the French, who measure poetry by the rule and compass, and give laws to inspiration.

Yet

Yet the mind of this author is cast in a larger poetical mould than ever before was used by nature to create a Frenchman. Madame de Genlis asserts that he is not of a good school. He is not indeed of her school, nor of any school which assumes pettiness as its principle. He has emancipated himself from the trammels which bound up all his predecessors. Should the poetry, which the French affect to stigmatize under the epithet of romantic, ever get footing among them, M. de Lamartine will be remembered as the founder of a school which shall supersede the classical mythological coldness and uniformity that prevail in all that has yet appeared in this department of French literature. But the person against whom Madame de Genlis seems to be the most envenomed is precisely that towards whom good taste, and self-respect would have made her the most tolerant, Madame de Staël. Of this lady she says, on her first acquaintance, Madame de Staël being then but sixteen and unmarried—

Elle m'étonna sans me plaire..... Madame Necker l'avoit fort mal élevée en lui laissant passer dans son salon les trois quarts de ses journées avec la foule des beaux esprits de ce tems qui tous entouroient Mademoiselle Necker; et tandis que sa mère s'occupoit des autres personnes, les beaux esprits dissertoient avec Mademoiselle Necker sur les passions et sur l'amour.'.... Elle apprit à parler vîte et beaucoup sans réfléchir; et c'est ainsi qu'elle a écrit. Elle eut fort peu d'instruction, n'approfondit rien; elle a mis dans ses ouvrages, non le résultat de souvenirs de bonnes lectures, mais un nombre infini de reminiscences de conversations incohérentes.'

She is still more abusive in another place, when she accuses Mad. de Staël of not knowing her own language, and says that she (Mad. de Genlis) was of use to her in correcting her style and reforming her affectation. She attributes much of the success of her rival in her last years to a large fortune and an excellent house; and concludes her invidious criticism thus :—

Elle m'a inspiré mille fois une idée et un sentiment qu'elle n'a jamais soupçonné; souvent, en pensant à elle, j'ai regretté qu'elle n'eût pas été ma fille, ou mon élève; ÎE lui aurois donné de bons principes littéraires, des idées justes et du naturel; et avec une telle éducation, l'esprit qu'elle avoit et une ame généreuse, elle eût été une personne accomplie, et la femme auteur la plus justement célèbre de notre tems.'

But she pronounces the opinion of her own superiority in more decided terms. A journalist, drawing a comparison between the two rival authoresses, parodies a well known line of poetry- Je ne décide point entre Genève et Rome'-and says Je ne décide point entre Genève et Paris.' The Parisian rival unhesitatingly exclaims:

Une femme, et un auteur, ne pouvoit manquer de saisir tout ce que ce -trait a de fin et d'obligeant; il faut convenir qu'en littérature Française,

lorsque

lorsque les deux villes se trouveront en rivalité, Paris vaudra toujours mieux que Genève.'

To the narrowed dimensions of mind which prevent Mad. de Genlis from measuring the great authors previously mentioned, she adds, in the present instance, the still narrower feeling of envy. We certainly are not partisans of Mad. de Staël. We coincide in very few of her opinions, political or moral; neither do we admit her philosophical reasonings to be just. But we cannot help admiring the large and powerful spirit which impelled her, even where we think her in the wrong. Every thought, every feeling of hers, even her errors, belong to a great intellect; and the most presumptuous thing we ever heard of was that such a pigmy, comparatively, as Mad. de Genlis, could imagine that the author of Corinne would not have been the worse for her tuition! We can hardly conceive two minds, both prolific in the same walk of literature, more different than these two. Of one of them we have already spoken. Of the other we need but say that what was deficient in the former was, in this, filled up even to exaggeration. No faculty was wanting to the Genevese rival, whose defects arose from the too great activity of one or two of them, which overthrew the equilibrium of the aggregate. Her judgment, in itself strong and powerful, when not counteracted by some vehement feeling, never would have wandered into the impracticable paths of republicanism, had she not been led astray by the conviction of an ideal perfection in mankind, of which society, hitherto at least, has given no large example. She never would have called suicide a sublime act as she certainly did-had she not been dazzled by the grandeur of the moral sentiments which sometimes have accompanied or seemed to accompany it. From such faults Madame de Genlis is indeed exempt, but she is also exempt from corresponding beauties.

As a compensation for the perpetual depreciation of a person so much her superior in intellect, our authoress lavishes her encomiums upon another lady, but one of a very different cast either from Mad. de Staël or de Genlis, namely, the Comtesse de Choiseul-Gouffier, née Princesse de Beauffremont.' Every thing which this lady does is exquisite. A bronze writing-stand presented by her to Madame de Genlis, and on which was engraved Euvres de Genlis,' is le présent le plus ingénieux et le plus charmant que j'ai reçu de ma vie.' A little screen also, on which were written some verses of Madame de Genlis's, in the midst of a' guirlande d'immortelles et de feuilles de chêne, portant des noix de galle dont on fait l'encre,' appears to have been very ravishing, But to proceed to greater matters-for our plan, if we can fulfil it, is to go on crescendo--the malignity of this accomplished

instructress