The great French novelist Georges Sand (Madame Dudevant), whose French
style was perhaps as near to achieving the perfect expression of her thought as any literary style which the world has ever known, died on Thursday, at the age of seventy-two. Some of her stories are amongst the world's masterpieces, for their beauty, vividness, and pathos. Many more are marked also by a mixture of mysticism and moral licence, which makes them at once attractive and enervating to the ordinary reader. There is always a large dash of noble sentiment in her books, but so much deification of impulse, and such capricious conceptions of duty and self-restraint, that her glowing genius has certainly relaxed many more restraints on the natural antinemian- ism of human nature than it has imposed or strengthened. With a strong moral curb on it, her genius would, we fancy, have gained even in power. Her luxuriance of sentiment was probably her chief literary peril and weakness.
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