Page:Madame de Staël (1887 Bella Duffy).djvu/199

Rh during her exile at Coppet and subsequent flight across Europe, it contains brilliant pictures of different lands, and especially of Russia. One is really amazed to note how much she grasped of the national characteristics during her brief sojourn in that country. The worst reproach that can be addressed to her description is that, as usual, it is rather too favourable. Her anxiety to prove that no country could flourish, during a reign such as Napoleon's, made her disposed to see through rose-coloured spectacles the Governments which found force to resist him.

The Considerations on the French Revolution were published posthumously. According to Sainte Beuve, this is the finest of Madame de Staël's works. "Her star," he says, "rose in its full splendour only above her tomb." It is difficult to pronounce any summary judgment on this book, which is partly biographical and partly historical. The first volume is principally devoted to a vindication of Necker; the scondsecond [sic] to an attack on Napoleon; the third to a study of the English Constitution and the applicability of its principles to France. The two first volumes alone were revised by the authoress before her death. We find in this work all Madame de Staël's natural and surprising power of comprehension. She handles difficult political problems with an ease that would be more astonishing still, had the book more unity. As it is, each separate circumstance is related and explained admirably, but one is not made to reach the core of the stupendous event of which Europe still feels the vibration. Her portrait of Napoleon is unsurpassable for force and irony, for sarcasm and truth. All she possessed of epigrammatic power seems to have