Apparently within the tradition of the sentimental novel, Caliste in fact centers around love, its obstacles, and the iniquities of the nobility. But equally, it demonstrates the absurdities of the bourgeois code, thus countering the philosophy of happiness that the sentimental genre exalts. Humiliation totally possesses Caliste as she gives up Vol-taireanreason, wishes to be freed from the constrictions of her personality, and longs for the positive sacrifice denied her by society. Deprived of true religious feeling, Caliste can only then turn to stoic sentimentality and thereby allow a wish for death to undermine her life. This death wish is a precursor of Romantic death as a refuge and as an expression of one's individuality. It reinforces a sense of the infinite rather close to that of the German pietists and pre-Romantics, Herman and Lessing; and calls for the vague des passions, showing Belle de Charrière, without Benjamin Constant, in a somewhat unusual light. (In French)

Manzoni structured his novel like a tapestry with juxtaposing planes or masses symbolizing good and evil and the redemptive tragedy that inevitably ensues when these forces meet. Thus a symmetrical expressive structure is simultaneously a moral structure. The tapestry is further crosswoven with images that interrelate and deepen the meaning of the context in which they appear or of the character with whom they are associated. They become word-symbols: words like “wall” or “skull” set tonalities, and so does “bread” as opposed to “wine” or “devil.” Similarly, descriptions involving images of light or the sun weave a dialectical fabric with images of darkness or clouds. While on the one hand the symbols exteriorize situations and events, on the other they are interiorized into the narrative and its characters so as to become their very lifeblood. What has been called Manzoni's “lyricization” of reality stems directly from this process.

Late eighteenth-century esteem for the moral qualities of the satires of Juvenal reflects a tradition which began with the church fathers. Renaissance critics praised Juvenal's style, which Boileau called “sublime.” Dryden, Dennis, and Johnson concurred with this neoclassical opinion. Putting Juvenal's sentiments into Christian contexts was not peculiar to the “Post-Augustans,” who continued Renaissance and neoclassical tradition. As Christian humanists, they used Juvenal's satires to supply “sentences” to add weight to their own moral sentiments.

Ernest Bramah (1868–1942), the author of The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900) and four other books on this Chinese storyteller, created a China so real and comprehensive that readers and reviewers often asked if he ever went to the Orient, to which he made a “bland, evasive reply.” In a letter to his publisher Grant Richards, dated 27 April 1923 and published here for the first time, Bramah writes that he has never been to China but it was not diplomatic to say so, for if he had lived there some would say his stories were merely translations, and if he had not been there, then they were imaginary and unreliable; thus he evaded the question.