Except for the production of the “Memoirs,” the last quarter of a century in Madame d’Arblay’s life was barren both of incident and employment. The details of her experience during the preceding fifteen years could not fail to interest us, if we had them related as she would have told them in her prime. Especially, we should like to know something more about that long detention in France, when chafing under police restrictions, and fretting for news from home, her heart vibrated to the continual echoes of cannon announcing Napoleon’s victories. But Fanny married, and growing elderly, was quite a different person from the Fanny of St. Martin’s Street and Chesington, of Streatham and Bath, of Windsor and Kew. Her Diary proper came to a final stop with the death of Mrs. Phillips in 1800. She will always be remembered as Frances Burney of the eighteenth century. Deriving her inspiration in part from Richardson, she heads the roll of those female novelists whose works form a considerable part of English literature. The purity of her writings first made the circulating library respectable. “We owe to her,” says Macaulay very justly, “not only ‘Evelina,’ ‘Cecilia,’ and ‘Camilla,’ but ‘Mansfield Park,’ and the ‘Absentee.’ Yet great as was her influence on her successors,[125] it was exhausted before the present century began. Indeed, it has been suggested, with some reason, that the excessive sensibility of her heroines is answerable for a reaction in Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen; for the too great amount of bright and cold good sense of the first; for the over-sobriety of feeling of the second.[126] Fanny’s genius for expressing character in dialogue, aided by touches of description, placed her among the first memoir-writers of that journalizing age. A little more power of compression would have made her diaries equal to the best of Boswell’s sketches.