It is rather surprising that with such models and with no supreme creative faculty she should have been able to draw such creditable walking gentlemen as the Frenchman Erfeuil, the Englishman Edgermond, and the Italian Castel-Forte; and should not have produced a worse hero than Nelvil.

For Nelvil, whatever faults he may have, and contemptible as his vacillating refusal to take the goods the gods provide him may be, is, after all, if not quite a live man, an excellent model of what a considerable number of the men of his time aimed at being, and would have liked to be.

He is not a bit less life-like than Byron's usual hero for instance, who probably owes not a little to him.
And so we get to a fresh virtue of _Corinne_, or rather we reach its main virtue by a different side.

It has an immense historical value as showing the temper, the aspirations, the ideas, and in a way the manners of a certain time and society.

A book which does this can never wholly lose its interest; it must always retain that interest in a great measure, for those who are able to appreciate it.