re to offset these defects!"

Her method of writing was very simple. It was the love of writing
that impelled her, almost without premeditation, to put into words
her dreams, meditations, and chimeras under concrete and living forms.
Yet, by the largeness of her sympathy and the ardor of her passions,
by the abundant inventions of stories, and by the harmonious
word-flow, she deserves to be ranked among the greatest writers
of France. Her career, taken as a whole, is one of prodigious
fecundity--a literary life that has "enchanted by its fictions or
troubled by its dreams" four or five generations. Never diminishing in
quality or inspiration, there are surprises in every new work.

No doubt George Sand has, for a generation or more, been somewhat
forgotten, but what great writer has not shared the same fate? When
the materialistic age has passed away, many famous writers of the
past will be resurrected, and with them George Sand; for her novels,
although written to please and entertain, discuss questions of
religion, philosophy, morality, problems of the heart, conscience, and
education,--and this is done in such a dramatic way that one feels all
to be true. More than that, her characters are all capable of carrying
out, to the end, a common moral and general theme with eloquence
seldom found in novels.

An interesting comparison might be made between Mme. de Stael and
George Sand, the two greatest women writers of France. Both wrote
from their experience of life, and fought passionately against the
prejudices and restrictions of social conventions; both were ideal
natures and were severely tried in the school of life, profiting
by their experiences; both possessed highly sensitive natures, and
suffered much; both were keenly enthusiastic and sympathetic, with
pardonable weaknesses; both lived through tragic wars; both evinced
a dislike for the commonplace and strove for greater freedom, but for
different publics, after unhappy marriages, both rose up as accusers
against the prevalent system of marrying young girls. But Mme. de
Stael was a virtuoso in conversation, a salon queen, and her happiness
was to be found in society alone; while George Sand found her
happiness in communion with Nature. This explains the two natures,
their sufferings, their joys, their writings.

The greatest punishment ever inflicted upon Mme. de Stael was her
exile, for it deprived her of her social life, a fact of which the
emperor was we