The Quarterly Review (Volume 10) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1814. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... * Art. IV.--De VAllemagne. Par Madame La Baronne De Stael Holstein. Seconde Edition. 3 torn. 8vo. 1813. Xj'EW pieces of literary history are more curious than those con**. nected with the present volumes. In themselves, whether we consider them as a review by a native of France of the vast circle of German authorship, or as the work of a woman ' de onmi scibili, ' (for, in truth, it is not easy to name that branch of human inquiry which does not find its place in some part or other of the following pages, )--their appearance is a phenomenon that fully justifies the interest which they have excited. Nor was it possible that this interest should not be much augmented by those singular acts of jealous power which sought to strangle in its swaddling clothes this formidable assertor of German eminence. The regular censors of the press in France (as Madame de Stael informs us, in an indignant and, to Englishmen, a sufficiently gratifying preface) were contented, indeed, to authorize its appearance with the exception of some few passages, which in the present edition are marked with inverted commas. This permission was in fact equivalent to an unqualified approbation of the whole; since the passages thus singled out are, in general, so little obnoxious either to praise or blame, so little distinguished from the rest of the w ork, and so easily spared from it, that the erasures may seem to have been made more from the desire of doing something than the impression that any thing was necessary to be done. Such harmless critics, whether before or after publication, are little qualitied to disturb an author's tranquillity. But there exists in modern France another and a very different judge of literary questions, by whom the daughter of Necker was regarded with no kindly nor ...