Nay more, he had always been destined to wed this very girl; and it was only after her father's second marriage with an Englishwoman that the younger and wholly English daughter, Lucile, was substituted in the paternal schemes as his destined spouse.

He hears, on the other hand, how Corinne had visited her fatherland and her step-mother, how she had found both intolerable, and how she had in a modified and decent degree "thrown her cap over the mill" by returning to Italy to live an independent life as a poetess, an improvisatrice, and, at least in private, an actress.
It is not necessary to supply fuller argument of the text which follows, and of which, when the reader has got this length, he is not likely to let the _denoument_ escape him.

But the action of _Corinne_ gets rather slowly under weigh; and I have known those who complained that they found the book hard to read because they were so long in coming to any clear notion of "what it was all about." Therefore so much argument as has been given seems allowable.
But we ought by this time to have laid sufficient foundation to make it not rash to erect a small superstructure of critical comment on the book now once more submitted to English readers.

Of that book I own that I was myself a good many years ago, and for a good many years, a harsh and even a rather unfair judge.

I do not know whether years have brought me the philosophic mind, or whether the book--itself, as has been said, the offspring of middle-aged emotions--appeals more directly to a middle-aged than to a young judgment.