known to be ingenuous. It might be truly said of her, that religion and justice formed the ground-work of all her duties. Her conduct proved at all times irreproachable and exemplary.

No sooner was Mr. Necker appointed to the management of the finances, than Madame Necker made his power serve to enlarge the exercise of her active benevolence. She contributed to the improvement of the internal regulations of the infirmaries of the metropolis, and undertook the special superintendance of an hospital which she founded at her own expense, near Paris, and which became the model of foundations of that kind. All her literary productions attest her care for suffering humanity. Her Essay on too precipitate Burials, her Observations on the Founding of Hospitals, and her Thoughts on Divorce, breathe an ardent zeal for the happiness of her fellow-creatures; and her sentiments were always in unison with her writings.

To make her husband known, to gain him the favour of literary men, the dispensers of fame, and to cause him to be handsomely spoken of in the highest circles, Madame Necker had formed a literary society, which used to meet once a week at her house. Along with Thomas, Buffon, Diderot, Marmontel, Saint Lambert, and other celebrated writers, who attended these meetings, they were honoured by the most distinguished residents of foreign courts, especially the Marquis de Caraccioli, ambassador of Naples, Lord Stormont, the ambassador of Great Britain, and Count de Creutz, the Swedish ambassador, whose mild philosophy, modest virtue, and eminent talents, received every where an equal share of esteem and admiration.

But, of all the academicians with whom Madame Necker had associated, in order to strengthen her mind by the aid of their genius, she placed none upon a level with Thomas and Buffon. The former she used to call the man of the age, and the latter the man of all ages. The veneration and attachment which she felt for these two persons, bordered on adoration; she considered their authority as part of her creed. It was particularly in the school of Thomas, a school so fertile in tinsel wit and confused metaphysics, that she became a slave to that affected style which, as it is continually aiming at elevation and grandeur, conceals her amiable mind, and fatigues, without interesting the reader.

Under the guidance of such a mother, Miss Necker acquired with ease that immense variety of knowledge which astonishes in her writings, and that brilliant superiority of style which renders their study so delightful, notwithstanding a degree of affectation which they occasionally betray, though much less frequently than the works of Madame Necker. Charmed with their early display, her parents neglected nothing to cultivate her talents. They were soon enabled to devote all their time to this object in a rural retreat.

Miss Necker was scarcely thirteen years old, when her father, impelled by an eager desire of praise, which tormented him during the whole course of his life, published the Account rendered to the king of his administration, and availing himself of the unexampled success with which it was received throughout France, demanded to be admitted into the privy council. It was in vain that his religion was urged as an obstacle.-He flattered himself that the fear of losing him would overcome this religious scruple: he persisted, and threatened to resign; but he became the victim of his presumption. His resignation was accepted on the 25th of May, 1781. He retired to Switzerland, where he bought the baronial manor of Copet, and he there published his work on the administration of the finances.

At the end of a few years, Mr. Necker re-appeared occasionally at Paris. Those of his friends who were truly his, and not the friends of his situation, visited his house as they had done while he was in office. Count de Creutz introduced to him the Baron de Stael-Holstein, who had just been sent to him from Sweden, as one of the Swedish embassy, and the latter was immediately admitted into Mr. Necker's society. Young, and of a handsome figure, he had the good fortune to please Miss Necker. As the king of Sweden shortly after recalled Count de Creutz, in order to place him at the head of the department of foreign affairs, in his own country, he was succeeded by the Baron de Stael-Holstein. Invested with the dignity of a Swedish ambassador at the court of France, and professing the Protestant religion, Baron de Stael soon became the envied husband of a rich heiress who had been courted in vain by many French noblemen, His happiness however was not much to be envied; not that Madame Stael was without attractions. Her appearance, though not handsome, was agreeable; her deportment noble.-She was of the middle size, graceful in her expressions and in her manners. She had much vivacity in her eyes, and much acuteness in her countenance, which seemed to heighten the pointed wit of her remarks. Her faults consisted in too great a carelessness in her dress, and an extreme desire of shining in conversation. She spoke little, but in aphorisms, and with the evident intention to. produce effect. The unhappy anxiety to become renowned, which she derived from her father, and the pedantic tone which she could not help contracting in the society of her mother and Mr. Thomas, must no doubt have been disagreeable to a man, simple and unaffected in his words and actions. But it was chiefly the great superiority of her talents over those of the Baron, that soon destroyed that happy harmony which reigns among couples more equally allied in this respect. The distance was indeed immense. The Baron had even few of those light graces by means of which

French vivacity frequently conceals a want of intellectual resour

ces.

It was, however, in consequence of this marriage, that Mr. Necker settled again in France, at a time when the prodigality of his successor in the financial department must necessarily have increased his reputation. But as Mr. de Calonne had attacked the veracity of his Account presented to the king, in the speech he pronounced at the opening of the meeting of the Notables in 1787, Mr. Necker sent a justification of this account to Louis XVI; and although the monarch expressly desired that it might not become known, his love of importance and glory could not keep him from publishing it. As soon as the king was informed that his answer to the speech of Mr. de Calonne was printed, he banished him to the distance of forty leagues from Paris.-The Baroness de Stael, who in the month of August of the same year. had given birth to a daughter, accompanied her father in his exile. It lasted only four months. On the 25th of August, 1788, the king recalled Mr. Necker into administration immediately after he had published his work On the Importance of Religious Opinions.

The period of this second ministerial reign, which on the 11th of July, 1789, ended in a second exile, is the time when Madame de Stael entered the thorny path of literature. She began with some Letters on the Writings and Character of J. J. Rousseau, which met with deserved applause. The third edition is enriched with a letter of Madame de Vassy, and an answer to it by Madame de Stael. But prior to this time, and ere she had reached the age of twenty, she had tried her talents in writing three short novels, which she printed at Lausanne in 1795, with an Essay on Fictions and a poetic Epistle to Misfortune, composed during the tyranny of Robespierre and his infamous coadjutors; the whole under the title of a Collection of detatched Pieces, the second edition of which was published, with corrections and additions, at Leipzic in 1796. In one of these short novels, called Mirza, Madame de Stael appears to have anticipated the plan which the African Society of London is now endeavouring to realise. She makes a traveller in Senegal relate that the governor had induced a negro family to settle at the distance of a few leagues, in order to establish a plantation similar to those of St. Domingo; hoping, no doubt, that such an example would excite the Africans to raise sugar, and that a free trade with this commodity in their own country would leave no inducement to Europeans to snatch them from their native soil, in order to submit them to the dreadful yoke of slavery.'

In her Essay on Fictions, Madame de Stael has endeavoured to prove that novels, which should give a sagacious, eloquent,

profound, and moral picture of real life, would be the most useful of all kinds of fictions. The imitation of truth constantly produces greater effects than are produced by supernatural means. Those protracted allegories, wherein, as in Spenser's Fairy Queen, each canto relates the battle of a knight representing a virtue against a vice his adversary, can never be interesting, whatever be the talent by which they are embellished. The reader arrives at the end, so fatigued with the romantic part of the allegory, that he has no strength left to understand its philosophical meaning. As for those allegories which aim at mingling jocular wit with moral ideas, Madame de Stael thinks that they attain their philosophical object but very imperfectly. When the allegory is really entertaining, most men remember its fable better than its result. Gulliver has afforded more amusement as a tale, than instruction as a moral composition.

Madame de Stael disapproves of novels founded upon historical facts. She pleads for natural fictions, and wishes to see the gift of exciting emotions applied to the passions of all ages, to the duties of all situations. Among the works of this kind, Tom Jones is that of which the moral is the most general. Love, in this novel, is introduced merely to heighten the philosophical result, to demonstrate the uncertainty of judgments built upon appearances, to show the superiority of natural and as it were involuntary qualities over reputations grounded on the mere respect of outward decorum, is the true object of Tom Jones.-Godwin's Caleb Williams, with all its tedious details and negligences, appears likewise to answer Madame de Stael's ideas of the inexhaustible kind of novels to which she alludes. Love has no share in the ground-work of this fiction. The unbridled passion of the hero of the novel for a distinguished reputation, and the insatiable curiosity of Caleb that leads him to ascertain whether Falkland deserves the esteem which he enjoys, are the only supports of the interest of the narrative.

These correct views shew how intimately Madame de Stael was acquainted with English literature even in her younger years. But she was not long permitted to enjoy her first literary success in peace. The crisis of the revolution, which embittered her life, was fast approaching.

On the 11th of July, 1789, her father was going to sit down to table with several guests, when the Secretary of State for the naval department came to him, took him aside and delivered to him a letter from the king, which commanded him to resign and to quit the French territory in silence. Madame Necker, whose health was rather precarious, did not take with her any domestic, nor any change of apparel, that their departure might not be suspected. They made use of the carriage in which they generally

took a ride in the evening, and hastened onwards night and day to Brussels. When the Baroness de Stael joined them three days afterwards with her husband, they were still wearing the same dress in which they were habited, when, after the grand dinner, during which no one had suspected their agitation, they had silently quitted France, their home, and their friends. Mr. Necker set off from Brussels, accompanied only by the Baron de Stael, to go to Basle through Germany. Madame Necker and the Baroness de Stael followed with a little less precipitation. They were overtaken at Francfort by the bearer of letters from the king and the national assembly, which recalled Mr. Necker for a third time into administration. As soon as Madame de Stael and her mother had joined him at Basle, he resolved to return to France. This journey from Basle to Paris was the most interesting moment of Madame de Stael's life. Her father was, as it were, borne in triumph, and she anticipated for the future none but happy days.

But these deceitful hopes were very soon banished. During the fifteen months of his being in office for the last time, Mr. Necker was constantly involved in a fruitless struggle in behalf of the executive power, and as he saw no prospect of being useful, he retired to his estate at Copet towards the end of 1790. Madame de Stael shortly after followed him thither. She returned to Paris in the first months of 1791, and took perhaps a more lively concern in the political events of the day than became the wife of a foreign ambassador. It has even been asserted, that, moved by the misfortunes with which Louis XVI was threatened, she formed the project of saving him, by affording him a secret retreat at an estate of the Duke of Orleans, in Normandy, which was then to be disposed of: but the king preferred to entrust himself to Count de Fersen, and took the road to Montmidi. She has also been reproached for her intimacy with M. de Talleyrand Périgord, at that time Bb. of Autun, Viscount Noailles, the Lameths, Barnave, Count Louis de Narbonne, Vergniaud, and other distinguished members of the constituent and first legislative assemblies; and it has been said that she accompanied Count Narbonne on his circuit to inspect the fortresses of the frontiers, immediately after his having been called to the head of the war department towards the end of 1791. Be this as it may, it is certain that she continued at Paris with her husband until the reign of terror. It was only in 1793 that she fled with him to Copet, and thence went over to England, where she resided several months. They did not return to France till the year 1795, after the Duke of Sudermannia, regent of the kingdom of Sweden during the minority of the unfortunate Gustavus Adolphus IV, had appointed Baron de Stael his ambassador with the French