prejudices; while the
situation is further complicated by the regulation discovery that
Corinne, though born in Italy of an Italian mother, is, strictly
speaking, his own compatriot, being the elder and lawful daughter of a
British peer, Lord Edgermond, his father's closest friend. Nay more, he
had always been destined to wed this very girl; and it was only after
her father's second marriage with an Englishwoman that the younger and
wholly English daughter, Lucile, was substituted in the paternal schemes
as his destined spouse. He hears, on the other hand, how Corinne had
visited her fatherland and her step-mother, how she had found both
intolerable, and how she had in a modified and decent degree "thrown her
cap over the mill" by returning to Italy to live an independent life as
a poetess, an improvisatrice, and, at least in private, an actress.

It is not necessary to supply fuller argument of the text which follows,
and of which, when the reader has got this length, he is not likely to
let the _denoument_ escape him. But the action of _Corinne_ gets rather
slowly under weigh; and I have known those who complained that they
found the book hard to read because they were so long in coming to any
clear notion of "what it was all about." Therefore so much argument as
has been given seems allowable.

But we ought by this time to have laid sufficient foundation to make it
not rash to erect a small superstructure of critical comment on the book
now once more submitted to English readers. Of that book I own that I
was myself a good many years ago, and for a good many years, a harsh and
even a rather unfair judge. I do not know whether years have brought me
the philosophic mind, or whether the book--itself, as has been said, the
offspring of middle-aged emotions--appeals more directly to a
middle-aged than to a young judgment. To the young of its own time and
the times immediately succeeding it appealed readily enough, and
scarcely Byron himself (who was not a little influenced by it) had more
to do with the Italomania of Europe in the second quarter of this
century than Madame de Stael.

The faults of the novel indeed are those which impress themselves (as
Mackintosh, we have seen, allowed) immediately and perhaps excessively.
M. Sorel observes of its companion sententiously but truly, "Si le style
de _Delphine_ semble vieilli, c'est qu'il a ete jeune." If not merely
the style but the sentiment, the whole properties and the