those they wished to please attractive, instructive, and delightful; and though not either of them had the smallest real malevolence in their compositions, neither of them could ever withstand the pleasure of uttering a repartee, let it wound whom it might, even though each would serve the very person they goaded with all the means in their power.  Both were kind, charitable, and munificent, and therefore beloved; both were sarcastic, careless, and daring, and therefore feared.  The morality of Madame de Stael was by far the most faulty, but so was the society to which she belonged; so were the general manners of those by whom she was encircled.”

There is one real point of similarity between Madame de Stael and Mrs. Piozzi, which has been omitted in the parallel.  Both were treated much in the same manner by the amiable, sensitive, and unsophisticated Fanny Burney.  In Feb. 1793, she wrote to her father, then at Paris, to announce her intimacy with a small “colony” of distinguished emigrants settled at Richmond, the cynosure of which was the far-famed daughter of Necker.  He writes to caution her on the strength of a suspicious liaison with M. de Narbonne.  She replies by declaring her belief that the charge is a gross calumny.  “Indeed, I think you could not spend a day with them and not see that their commerce is that of pure, but exalted and most elegant, friendship.  I would, nevertheless, give the world to avoid being a guest under their roof, now that I have heard even the shadow of such a rumour.”

If Mr. Croker was right, she was then in her forty-second year; at all events, no tender, timid, delicate maiden, ready to start at a hint or semblance of impropriety; and she waved her scruples without hesitation when they stood in the way of her intercourse with M. D’Arblay, whom she married in July 1793, he being then employed in transcribing Madame de Stael’s Essay on the Influence of the Passions.

As to the parallel, with all due deference to Madame D’Arblay’s proved sagacity aided by her personal knowledge of her two gifted friends, it may be suggested that they present fewer points of resemblance than any two women of at all corresponding celebrity.[1] The superiority in the highest qualities of mind will be awarded without hesitation to the French woman, although M. Thiers terms her writings the perfection of mediocrity.  She grappled successfully with some of the weightiest and subtlest questions of social and political science; in criticism she displayed powers which Schlegel might have envied while he aided their fullest development in her “Germany”; and her “Corinne” ranks amongst the best of those works of fiction which excel in description, reflection, and sentiment, rather than in pathos, fancy, stirring incident, or artfully contrived plot.  But her tone of mind was so essentially and notoriously masculine, that when she asked Talleyrand whether he had read her “Delphine,” he answered, “Non, Madame, mais on m’a dit que-nous