actually serves as common friend,
confidant, and almost as honourable go-between, to her and Nelvil.

On the other hand, French critics have justly complained, and critics
not French may endorse the complaint, that the Comte d'Erfeuil is a mere
caricature of the "frivolous" French type too commonly accepted out of
France. He is well-mannered, not ill-natured, and even not, personally,
very conceited, but utterly shallow, incapable of a serious interest in
art, letters, or anything else, blandly convinced that everything French
is superlative and that nothing not French is worthy of attention.
Although he appears rather frequently, he plays no real part in the
story, and, unless there was some personal grudge to pay off (which is
not unlikely), it is difficult to imagine why Madame de Stael should
have introduced a character which certainly does her skill as a
character-drawer very little credit.

[Sidenote: The character of Nelvil.]

It is, however, quite possible that she was led astray by a
will-o'-the-wisp, which has often misled artists not of the very first
class--the chance of an easy contrast. The light-hearted, light-minded
Erfeuil was to set off the tense and serious Nelvil--a type again, as he
was evidently intended to be, but a somewhat new type of Englishman. She
was a devotee of Rousseau, and she undoubtedly had the egregious Bomston
before her. But, though her sojourn in England had not taught her very
much about actual Englishman, she had probably read Mackenzie, and knew
that the "Man of Feeling" touch had to some extent affected us. She
tried to combine the two, with divers hints of hearsay and a good deal
of pure fancy, and the result was Oswald, Lord Nelvil. As with that
other curious contemporary of hers with whom we deal in this chapter,
the result was startlingly powerful in literature. There is no doubt
that the Byronic hero, whose importance of a kind is unmistakable and
undeniable, is Schedoni, Rene, and Nelvil sliced up, pounded in a
mortar, and made into a rissole with Byron's own sauce of style in
rhetoric or (if anybody will have it so) poetry, but with very little
more substantial ingredients. As for the worthy peer of Scotland or
England, more recent estimates have seldom been favourable, and never
ought to have been so. M. Sorel calls him a "snob"; but that is only one
of the numerous and, according to amiable judgments, creditable
instances of the inability of the French to discern exa