Whatever injury Miss Burney may have sustained by entering the palace, her readers at least have no cause to complain. ‘I am glad for _her_ interest,’ wrote Walpole, ‘though sorry for my own, that Evelina and Cecilia are to be transformed into a Madame de Motteville, as I shall certainly not live to read her Memoirs, though I might another novel.’ But what was to Horace a source of regret, may be to us matter for congratulation. Fanny’s Diaries are now much more studied than her novels. Few of us would wish to exchange the journal of her life at Court for another fiction from her pen. The Harrels, the Delvilles, the Briggses, about whom Burke and Reynolds and Mrs. Delany talked as if they were real personages, are for most of us names that call up no association. Queen Charlotte and stout King George are better known to us than any other royal pair mentioned in English history. And for this we are in great measure indebted to the little lady who joined their household in July, 1786. The likeness of the Queen, which we remember as well as we do the features of our mothers, is entirely of her drawing; while she contributes not a few of the sketches which are combined in our impression of the monarch who loved music, and backgammon, and homely chat, and Ogden’s sermons, as much as he detested popery, and whiggery, and freethinking, and Wilkes. Nor are characters of another kind wanting in this journal. Mrs. Schwellenberg’s arrogance, her insolence, her peevishness, her ferocious selfishness, her broken English, are more familiar to the present generation than the humours, the affectations, the piebald dialect of Madame Duval, or than the traits of any of the other figures in Evelina. The Senior Robe-keeper was no doubt as indifferent to posthumous reputation as she was to the contemporary opinion of all who could not displace her. That she ran any risk from the satire of her timorous assistant was a thought which never occurred to her illiterate mind. She hardly knew what satire meant. She flattered herself that Harry Bunbury could not caricature her because she had no hump. For writers of imagination she had an unbounded contempt. ‘I won’t have nothing what you call novels,’ she once cried in Fanny’s presence, ‘what you call romances, what you call histories—I might not read such what you call stuff—not I!’ Had she been one degree less callous, or one degree less ignorant, she might have been slower to provoke the hostility of Johnson’s ‘little character-monger.’ Well! we have her portrait, most carefully executed. And we have also, by the same cunning hand, vivid delineations of many other persons, more or less notable, and of several interesting scenes that fell under the artist’s view during her connection with the Queen. We do not go to Miss Burney’s record of those five years for secrets of state, or politics, or even Court scandal—with which last, indeed, she seems to have busied