NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. ONE paper, an essay on the British freedmen in Jamaica, entitled "The Doom of the Negro Race," is omitted from this edition, as not being of interest to the American reader, either in subject or treatment. LITERARY AND SOCIAL JUDGMENTS. "THE MADAME DE STAËL what Life and Times of Madame de Staël": a promise of vivid interest does not the title hold forth! What a host of images and ideas start into life. at the spell of that name, and silently group themselves around the central figure! Necker, the object of her life-long worship, with his grand position, his bourgeois intellect, and his rare integrity; Madame Necker, the rigid mother, the tender wife, the faithful friend,— puritanical, precise, bornée, but not ungenial; Gibbon, at first the phlegmatic lover, afterwards the philosophic friend, but always brilliant, fascinating, and profound; Louis de Narbonne, perhaps the most perfect specimen then extant of the finished noble of the ancien régime, polished to the core, not varnished merely on the surface; Talleyrand, the subtlest and deepest intellect of his time, and long the intimate associate of Madame de Staël; Napoleon, her relentless secutor; Benjamin Constant and Schlegel, her sted and attached allies:these men form the circle of which she was the centre and the chief. Then the "times" in which she lived! She saw the commencement and the close of that great social earthquake which overthrew the oldest dynasty in Europe, shook society to its foundation, unsettled the minds of men to their inmost depths, turned up the subsoil of The Life and Times of Madame de Staël By Maria Norris. London, 1853. nations with a deeper ploughshare than Destiny had ever yet driven, and opened the way for those new social ideas and those new political arrangements which are still operating and fermenting, and the final issue, the "perfect work," of which our children's children may not live to see. Her life, though only prolonged through half a century, was coeval with that series of great events which, for magnitude and meaning, have no parallel in human history; by all of which she was more or less affected; in some of which she took a prominent and not uninfluential part. She was born while the house of Bourbon was at the height of its meretricious splendor and its reckless profligacy: she lived to see it return, after its tragic downfall and its dreary banishment, to a house that had been "swept and garnished," - little better and no wiser than before. She saw the rise, the culmination, and the setting of Napoleon's meteor-star; she had reached the pinnacle of her fame while he was laying the foundation of his; and she, shattered and way-worn, was beginning to look forward to her final rest when his career was closed forever in defeat and exile. But it is not of the period in which she lived that we think first or most naturally when we hear the name of · Madame de Staël: it is of the writer whose wondrous genius and glowing eloquence held captive our souls in "the season of susceptive youth," of the author of the Lettres sur Rousseau, who sanctioned and justified our early partiality for that fascinating rhapsodist, of L'Allemagne, from whose pages we first imbibed a longing to make the riches of that mighty literature our own,-of Corinne, over whose woes and sorrows so many eyes have wept delicious tears; of that dazzling admixture of deep thought, tender sentiment, and brilliant fancy, which give to her writings a charm possessed by the productions of no other woman,- and in truth of but few men. Anne-Marie Louise Necker was born at Paris in 1766. Both her parents were remarkable persons. Her father, |