amount of talent in other directions; but while he must have had some domestic virtues he was a wooden pedant.  Her husband hardly counted for more in her life than her maitre d’hotel, and though there seems to have been no particular harm in him, had no special talents and no special virtues.  Her first regular lover, Narbonne, was a handsome, dignified, heartless roue of the old regime.  Her second, Benjamin Constant, was a man of genius, and capable of passionate if inconstant attachment, but also what his own generation in England called a thorough “raff”—­selfish, treacherous, fickle, incapable of considering either the happiness or the reputation of women, theatrical in his ways and language, venal, insolent, ungrateful.  Schlegel, though he too had some touch of genius in him, was half pedant, half coxcomb, and full of intellectual and moral faultiness.  The rest of her mighty herd of male friends and hangers-on ranged from Mathieu de Montmorency—­of whom, in the words of Medora Trevilian it may be said, that he was “only an excellent person”—­through respectable savants like Sismondi and Dumont, down to a very low level of toady and tuft-hunter.  It is rather surprising that with such models and with no supreme creative faculty she should have been able to draw such creditable walking gentlemen as the Frenchman Erfeuil, the Englishman Edgermond, and the Italian Castel-Forte; and should not have produced a worse hero than Nelvil.  For Nelvil, whatever faults he may have, and contemptible as his vacillating refusal to take the goods the gods provide him may be, is, after all, if not quite a live man, an excellent model of what a considerable number of the men of his time aimed at being, and would have liked to be.  He is not a bit less life-like than Byron’s usual hero for instance, who probably owes not a little to him.

And so we get to a fresh virtue of Corinne, or rather we reach its main virtue by a different side.  It has an immense historical value as showing the temper, the aspirations, the ideas, and in a way the manners of a certain time and society.  A book which does this can never wholly lose its interest; it must always retain that interest in a great measure, for those who are able to appreciate it.  And it must interest them far more keenly, when, besides this secondary and, so to speak, historical merit, it exhibits such veracity in the portraiture of emotion, as, whatever be its drawbacks, whatever its little temptations to ridicule, distinguishes the hapless, and, when all is said, the noble and pathetic figure of Corinne.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

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