ime, or the time a
little before her; for, as has been more than hinted already, _Corinne_,
though a book of far less genius, strength, and concentration than
_Adolphe_, is, like it, though from the other side, and on a far larger
scale, the history of the Nemesis of Sensibility.

[Sidenote: Nelvil again.]

But Nelvil? He is, it has been said, a deplorable kind of creature--a
kind of creature (to vary Dr. Johnson's doom on the unlucky mutton)
ill-_bred_, ill-educated, ill- (though not quite in the ordinary sense)
natured, ill-fated to an extent which he could partly, but only partly,
have helped; and ill-conducted to an extent which he might have helped
almost altogether. But is he unnatural? I fear--I trow--not. He is, I
think, rather more natural than Edgar of Ravenswood, who is something of
the same class, and who may perhaps owe a very little to him. At any
rate, though he has more to do with the theatre, he is less purely
theatrical than that black-plumed Master. And it seems to me that he is
more differentiated from the Sensibility heroes than even Corinne
herself is from the Sensibility heroines, though one sympathises with
her much more than with him. _Homo est_, though scarcely _vir_. Now it
is humanity which we have been always seeking, but not always finding,
in the long and often brilliant list of French novels before his day.
And we have found it here once more.

[Sidenote: Its aesthetics.]

But we find also something more; and this something more gives it not
merely an additional but even to some extent a fresh hold upon the
history of the novel itself. To say that it is in great part a
"guide-book novel," as indeed its second title[18] honestly declares,
may seem nowadays a doubtful testimonial. It is not really so. For it
was, with certain exceptions in German, the _first_ "guide-book" novel:
and though some of those exceptions may have shown greater 'literary
genius than Madame de Stael's, the Germans, though they have, in certain
lines, had no superiors as producers of tales, have never produced a
good novel yet.[19] Moreover, the guide-book element is a great set-off
to the novel. It is not--or at any rate it is not necessarily--liable to
the objections to "purpose," for it is ornamental and not structural. It
takes a new and important and almost illimitably fresh province of
nature and of art, which is a part of nature, to be its appanage. It
would be out of place here to trace the development of