s well
as declamatory. "Such is the ugliness of man when he bids farewell to
his soul and, so to speak, keeps house only with his body" is a phrase
which might possibly shock La Harpe, but which is, as far as I remember,
original, and is certainly crisp and effective enough.

Reassembling, then, the various points which we have endeavoured to make
in respect of his position as novelist, it may once more be urged that
if not precisely a great master of the complete art of novel-writing, by
actual example, he shows no small expertness in various parts of it: and
that, as a teacher and experimenter in new developments of method and
indication of new material, he has few superiors in his own country and
not very many elsewhere. That in this pioneer quality, as well as in
mere contemporaneousness, he may, though a greater writer, be yoked with
the authoress of _Corinne_ need hardly be argued, for the accounts given
of the two should have sufficiently established it.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Although, except in special cases, biographical notices are not
given here, the reader may be reminded that she was born in 1766, the
daughter of Necker and of Gibbon's early love, Susanne Curchod; married
at twenty the Swedish ambassador, Baron of Stael-Holstein; sympathised
at first with the Revolution, but was horrified at the murder of the
king, and escaped, with some difficulty, from Paris to England, where,
as well as in' Germany and at Coppet, her own house in Switzerland, she
passed the time till French things settled down under Napoleon. With him
she tried to get on, as a duplicate of himself in petticoats and the
realm of mind. But this was clearly impossible, and she had once more to
retire to Coppet. She had separated, though without positive quarrel,
from her husband, whom, however, she attended on his death-bed; and the
exact character of her _liaisons_ with others, especially M. de Narbonne
and Benjamin Constant, is not easy to determine. In 1812 she married,
privately, a young officer, Rocca by name, returned to Paris before and
after the Hundred Days, and died there in 1817.

[9] I never can make up my mind whether I am more sorry that Madame
Necker did not marry Gibbon or that Mademoiselle Necker did not, as was
subsequently on the cards, marry Pitt. The results in either case--both,
alas! could hardly have come off--would have been most curious.

[10] The most obvious if not the only possible reason for this would be
inten