who were contemporary with Madame Riccoboni's later days,
and who followed her, pushed the thing, if it were possible, even
farther. In Madame de Genlis's tiny novelette of _Mademoiselle de
Clermont_, the amount of tears shed, the way in which the knees of the
characters knock together, their palenesses, blushes, tears, sighs, and
other performances of the same kind, are surprising. In the _Lettres du
Marquis de Roselle_ of Madame Elie de Beaumont (wife of the young
advocate who defended the Calas family), a long scene between a brother
and sister, in which the sister seeks to deter the brother from what she
regards as a misalliance, ends (or at least almost ends, for the usual
flood of tears is the actual conclusion) in this remarkable passage.

"And I," cried he suddenly with a kind of fury, "I suppose
that a sister who loves her brother, pities and does not
insult him; that the Marquis de Roselle knows better what
can make him happy than the Countess of St. Sever; and that
he is free, independent, able to dispose of himself, in
spite of all opposition." With these words he turned to
leave the room brusquely. I run to him, I stop him, he
resists. "My brother!" "I have no sister." He makes a
movement to free himself: he was about to escape me. "Oh, my
father!" I cried. "Oh, my mother! come to my help." At these
sacred names he started, stopped, and _allowed himself to be
conducted to a sofa_.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Souza.]

This unlucky termination might be paralleled from many other places,
even from the agreeable writings of Madame de Souza. This writer, by the
way, when the father of one of her heroes refuses to consent to his
son's marriage, makes the stern parent yield to a representation that by
not doing so he will "authorise by anticipation a want of filial
attachment and respect" in the grandchildren who do not as yet exist.
These excursions into the preposterous in search of something new in the
way of noble sentiment or affecting emotion--these whippings and
spurrings of the feelings and the fancy--characterise all the later work
of the school.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Xavier de Maistre.]

Two names of great literary value and interest close the list of the
novelists of Sensibility in France, and show at once its Nemesis and its
caricature. They were almost contemporaries, and by a curious
coincidence neither was a