CHAPTER XV.
HER WORKS.
Any notice of Madame de Staël would be imperfect without a review of her works. She did not begin, like so many famous authors, to write at an abnormally early age—it is true, she composed Portraits, which were read aloud in her mother's salon, but everybody did as much in those days, and her attempts were not sufficiently remarkable to stamp her at once as a literary genius. It has been said how much her father discouraged her writing. This may account in part for the tardy development of the taste, although more was doubtless due to the peerless conversations in which, before the Revolution, her young intellect found all that it could need of ideas. However this may be, she was twenty before she wrote Sophie, ou les Sentimens Secrets, that elegiac "comedy" which drew down on its authoress's youthful head the animadversions of her austere mother. Madame Necker was shocked at the subject, which represented a young girl of seventeen struggling against a secret passion for her guardian, a married
