t which the manners had
excited, and had one's more appreciative faculties clear for the book
itself.

[Sidenote: The story.]

The story of _Corinne_, though not extraordinarily "accidented" and, as
will be seen, adulterated, or at least mixed, with a good many things
that are not story at all, is fairly solid, much more so than that of
_Delphine_. It turns--though the reader is not definitely informed of
this till the book is half over--on the fact of an English nobleman,
Lord Edgermond (dead at _temp._ of tale), having had two wives, the
first an Italian. By her he had one daughter, whose actual Christian
name (unless I forget) we are never told, and he lived with them in
Italy till his wife's death. Then he went home and married a second
wife, an English or Scotch woman (for her name seems to have been
Maclinson--a well-known clan) of very prudish disposition. By her he had
another daughter, Lucile--younger by a good many years than her sister.
To that sister Lady Edgermond the second does not behave exactly in the
traditionally novercal fashion, but she is scandalised by the girl's
Italian ways, artistic and literary temperament, desire for society,
etc. After Lord Edgermond's death the discord of the two becomes
intolerable, and the elder Miss Edgermond, coming of age and into an
independent fortune, breaks loose and returns to Italy, her stepmother
stipulating that she shall drop her family name altogether and allow
herself to be given out as dead. She consents (unwisely, but perhaps
not unnaturally), appears in Italy under the name of "Corinne," and
establishes herself without difficulty in the best Roman society as a
lady of means, great beauty, irreproachable character, but given to
private displays of her talents as singer, improvisatrice, actress, and
what not.

But before she has thus thrown a still respectable bonnet over a not too
disreputable mill, something has happened which has, in the long run,
fatal consequences. Lord Edgermond has a friend, Lord Nelvil, who has a
son rather younger than Corinne. Both fathers think that a marriage
would be a good thing, and the elder Nelvil comes to stay with the
Edgermonds to propose it. Corinne (or whatever her name was then) lays
herself out in a perfectly innocent but, as he thinks, forward manner to
please him, and he, being apparently (we never see him in person) not a
little of an old fool, cries off this project, but tells Edgermond that
he should like hi