She was now as keen as Crisp would have had her be in calculating how she could make most money by her pen. ‘I determined,’ she says, ‘when I changed my state, to set aside all my innate and original abhorrences, and to regard and use as resources myself what had always been considered as such by others. Without this idea and this resolution, our hermitage must have been madness.’ She had formerly objected to a plan, suggested for her by Burke, of publishing by subscription, with the aid of ladies, instead of booksellers, to keep lists and receive names of subscribers. She determined to adopt this plan in bringing out ‘Camilla.’ The Dowager Duchess of Leinster, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Crewe, and Mrs. Locke, gave her the required assistance. In issuing her proposals, she was careful not to excite the prejudice which still prevailed against works of fiction.[114] She remembered that the word _novel_ had long stood in the way of ‘Cecilia’ at Windsor, and that the Princesses had not been allowed to read it until it had been declared innocent by a bishop. ‘Camilla,’ she warned her friends, was ‘not to be a romance, but sketches of characters and morals put in action.’ It was, therefore, announced simply as ‘a new work by the author of Evelina and Cecilia.’ The manuscript was completed by the end of 1795; but, as in the case of ‘Cecilia,’ six months more elapsed before the day of publication arrived. Meanwhile, the subscription-list filled up nobly. When Warren Hastings heard what was going forward, we are told that “he gave a great jump, and exclaimed, ‘Well, then, now I can serve her, thank Heaven, and I will! I will write to Anderson to engage Scotland, and I will attack the East Indies myself!’” Nor was Edmund Burke less zealous than his old enemy. Protesting that for personal friends the subscription ought to be five guineas instead of one, he asked for but one copy of ‘Camilla’ in return for twenty guineas which he sent on behalf of himself, his wife, his dead brother Richard, and the son for whom he was in mourning. In the same spirit, three Misses Thrale order ten sets of the book. As we glance down the pages of the list, we meet with most of the survivors of the old Blue Stockings, with Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Montagu, and Hannah Moore. There, too, are many literary women of other types: Anna Barbauld, Amelia Alderson, afterwards Mrs. Opie, Mary Berry, Maria Edgeworth, Sophia and Harriet Lee.[115] There the incomparable Jane Austen, then a girl of twenty, pays tribute to a passed mistress of her future art. There also figure the names of many of the writer’s former colleagues in the royal household. Even Mrs. Schwellenberg is on the list. Perhaps, as the book was to be dedicated by permission to the Queen, this was almost a matter of course. But the subscription was, in fact, a testimonial to a general favourite from hundreds of attached friends, some of whom cared little for literature; as well as from a