cond from their own
works. At the time she was delivered of her quarto about France in 1810,
Paris was still immersed in classical darkness, and it may therefore be
fairly inferred that the romantic light with which it has since been
illumined, radiated from that same tome. What can be more natural? When
she left France, "the word '_Romanticism_' was unknown (or nearly so) in
the circles of Paris; the writers _a la mode_, whether ultra or liberal,
were, or thought themselves to be, supporters and practisers of the old
school of literature;" in the interval of her absence she published a
work in which she told the Parisians that Racine was no poet, and gave
them other valuable information of the kind, calculated to dispel their
classical infatuation:--when she returned, every thing was changed;
poets and prosers were vieing with each other in gloriously offending
against all rules and canons; Romanticism, in short, was, as she
asserts, completely the order of the day. The classical wrath of one man
was the source of unnumbered woes to ancient Greece, and why may not the
romantic wrath of one woman--a woman too, who keeps autocrats and
sultans _fidgetty_ on their thrones, be the cause of a change in the
literature of a country? This change, at all events, however it may have
been operated, seems to have inspired her with additional courage in her
assaults, and additional fury in her anathemas upon the poor French
authors whom the ignorant world has hitherto been in the habit of
regarding as objects of admiration. She now asserts, in "France in
1829-30," that the whole classic literature of that country is "feeble
and unuseful," nay, even fitted to "enervate and degrade;" and in a
wonderfully luminous chapter about modern literature, she has shown as
clearly as Hudibras could have proved by "force of argument" that "a
man's no horse," that Classicism is the ally of despotism, and that it
was the policy of arbitrary power to encourage a fondness for the
ancient authors!

Fiercely romantic, however, as her Ladyship is, she is mild as a cooing
dove in comparison with the male interlocutor in the famous conversation
to which we have alluded. This personage completely out-herods Herod;
but that he was an ultra in disguise, endeavouring to make her Ladyship
write down absurdities, is a conviction which 'fire and water could not
drive out of' us;--even she, herself, at one period of the dialogue, can
not help doubting whether she