"LITTLE FANNY BURNEY."

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Fanny Burney," 1 whose writings Burke sat up all night to read, while Johnson pronounced them superior to Fielding's, and declared they would have done honour to Richardson. She it was who asserted for women their right to a province in the world of fiction; and by her novels of "Evelina" and "Cecilia" showed that Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett were to find in a woman their true successor. The stories and romances which Aphra Behn, Mrs. Centlivre, and Susan Fielding had poured out upon the public bore a patent stamp of inferiority; but the most cynical critics were compelled to own that "Evelina was entitled to a place beside "Amelia" and "Clarissa." This outburst of female genius was a revelation! Here was a woman with a sense of the humorous as quick as Smollett's, an eye for the salient points of character almost as vigilant as Fielding's, and a power of depicting manners not inferior to Richardson's. She did for the English novel, moreover, that work of purification which Jeremy Collier did for the English drama, but she did it in a better way. "She first showed that a tale might be written in which both the fashionable and vulgar life of London might be exhibited with great force and with broad comic humour, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. She took away. the reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. She vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters."

But it might be contended that if Miss Burney reformed she did not originate; that if she were the equal, or almost the equal, of the three great novelists, she did but follow in their footsteps. To assert the originality of woman's genius became the task of Mrs. Radcliffe, whom we regard as the true founder of the English school of romance, and as, moreover, the first to brighten fiction with the features and bloom of Nature. Her predecessors had painted human character and human manners, social life and the life of the streets, with

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1 Born, 1752; died, 1840. Beside the works named in the text, she wrote Camilla," and "The Wanderer," and "Memoirs of Dr. Charles Burney (her father). Her "Diary" was published in 1846. It is replete with shrewd observation and lively description.

2 The works of Horace Walpole ("The Castle of Otranto") and of Mrs. Charlotte Smith ("The Old Manor-House ") were simply medieval

equal force and fidelity; it was reserved for her to dip her pencil in the artist's colours and cover her canvas with beautiful landscapes. Her style, like her sentiments, is instinct with poetry. She had a deep love of Nature, and it lends a peculiar charm to her eloquence. Hence the effect of her books, so vivid, so fresh, and so new-of "The Romance of the Forest" and "The Mysteries of Udolpho "-was electrical. The reader was conscious of sensations entirely novel as he was conducted through the long green avenues of ancient woods, or beneath cliffs crowned with groves, whose rough foliage clothed their steeps in picturesque luxuriance, or by the shore of a melancholy sea which the pale moon traversed in a path of silver light, or into a valley of the Apennines, closed by a long perspective of receding mountains and dark with the shadow of immemorial pines. Indirectly, Mrs. Radcliffe's romances were a protest against the commonplace conventionalism and prosaic realism of her age. They infused a new life into English poetry and English prose, and both Byron and Sir Walter Scott felt the spell of their magic. As Scott said, they could have been written only by one to whom Nature had given the eye of a painter with the spirit of a poet. Take the following description :-"The first tender tints of morning now appeared on the verge of the horizon, stealing upon the darkness, so pure, so fine, so ethereal, it seemed as if heaven was opening to the view. The dark mists were seen to roll off to the west as the tints of light grew stronger, deepening the obscurity of that part of the hemisphere, and encircling the features of the country below; meanwhile, in the east the hues became more vivid, darting a trembling lustre far around, till a ruddy glow, which fired all that part of the heavens, announced the rising sun. At first a small line of inconceivable splendour emerged on the horizon, which quickly expanding, the sun appeared in all his glory, unveiling the whole face of Nature, vivifying every colour of the landscape, and sprinkling the dewy earth with glittering light. The low and gentle responses of the birds, awakened by the morning ray,

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fictions, invested with a pseudo-Gothicism, and touched with a supernatural element. Mrs. Charlotte's Smith's other romances, "Emmeline," "Ethelinda," Celestina," ""Desmond," ," "Montalbert," &c., are of a very ordinary character. She is seen to much greater advantage in her "Elegiac Sonnets." Born, 1749; died, 1806.

MARY WOLLSTONECROFT.

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now broke the silence of the hour, their soft warbling rising by degrees till they swelled the chorus of universal gladness." Word-painting such as this had been unknown in English literature for nearly two centuries, and its subtle and penetrating charm was universally acknowledged by the public. Poets and critics also confessed to it. Even Hazlitt was ready to acknowledge that to Mrs. Radcliffe he owed his love of ruined tower and minster, of moonlit nights, and the autumnal pomp of the forest. There were tones in her lyre which Wordsworth himself did not disdain to echo.1

Reference must now be made to Mary Wollstonecroft (17591796), who has been called "the English George Sand," more, we presume, on account of the irregularity of her life, and the laxity of her moral system, than because there was any intellectual affinity between them. She was a woman of considerable ability and much industry, who wrote novels, reviews, and translations, and broached some startling theories in her "Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Her "Memoirs," published. by her husband, William Godwin, and her "Letters," recently edited by Mr. C. Kegan Paul, contain curious illustrations of the erratic tendencies of an impulsive disposition and undisciplined intellect, and, if interesting, are certainly painful reading. Her daughter, Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin (1798–1851), inherited her mother's unhappy notions of social philosophy with her father's genius. In 1816 she became the wife of the poet Shelley, and two years later published the original and striking romance by which she will be long remembered, “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus." The conception was undeniably powerful, and it is skilfully wrought out. The same remarkable capacity for mental analysis, and for the invention of novel situations, is seen in her romances of "Valperga" and "The Last Man." As works of fiction and in artistic development, her other stories, "Lodore" and "Perkin Warbeck," seem to us far inferior. Mrs. Shelley also produced some well-written biographies of men of letters and artists, and edited her husband's Poems and Essays. Her own style. is graceful, clear, and flowing, with a plaintive melody like that of a minor key characterising it.

1 Mrs. Radcliffe was born in 1764, died in 1823. She wrote "The Sicilian Romance," "The Italian," ""A Journey through Holland," and "Poems."