I make no exception in favor of Miss Burney;[431] though she was the forerunner of a new era. Suppose a country {191} in which dress is always of one color; suppose an importer who brings in cargoes of blue stuff, red stuff, green stuff, etc., and exhibits dresses of these several colors, that person is the similitude of Miss Burney. It would be a delightful change from a universal dull brown, to see one person all red, another all blue, etc.; but the real inventor of pleasant dress would be the one who could mix his colors and keep down the bright and gaudy. Miss Burney's introduction was so charming, by contrast, that she nailed such men as Johnson, Burke, Garrick, etc., to her books. But when a person who has read them with keen pleasure in boyhood, as I did, comes back to them after a long period, during which he has made acquaintance with the great novelists of our century, three-quarters of the pleasure is replaced by wonder that he had not seen he was at a puppet-show, not at a drama. Take some _labeled_ characters out of our humorists, let them be put together into one piece, to speak only as labeled: let there be a Dominie with nothing but "Prodigious!" a Dick Swiveller with nothing but adapted quotations; a Dr. Folliott with nothing but sneers at Lord Brougham;[432] and the whole will pack up into one of Miss Burney's novels. Maria Edgeworth,[433] Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan),[434] Jane Austen,[435] Walter Scott,[436] etc., are all of our century; as {192} are, I believe, all the Minerva Press novels, as they were called, which show some of the power in question. Perhaps dramatic talent found its best encouragement in the drama itself. But I cannot ascertain that any such power was directed at the multitude, whether educated or uneducated, with natural mixture of character, under the restraints of decorum, until the use of it by two religious writers of the school called "evangelical," Hannah More and Rowland Hill.[437] The _Village Dialogues_, though not equal to the _Repository Tracts_, are in many parts an approach, and perhaps a copy; there is frequently humorous satire, in that most effective form, self-display. They were published in 1800, and, partly at least, by the Religious Tract Society, the lineal successor of the _Repository_ association, though knowing nothing about its predecessor. I think it right to add that Rowland Hill here mentioned is not the regenerator of the Post Office.[438] Some do not distinguish accurately; I have heard of more than one who took me to have had a logical controversy with a diplomatist who died some years before I was born. THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY.