“The author herself,” says Mr. Leslie Stephen, “with her insatiable delight in compliments—certainly such as might well turn her head—her quick observation and lively garrulity, her effusion of sentiment rather lively than deep, but never insincere, her vehement prejudices corrected by flashes of humour, is always amusing.” We may assent to every word of this sentence, and yet feel that it does its subject something less than justice. We trust that our readers have found Fanny amusing; we trust also that they have recognised in her the possession of some higher qualities. If she was vain, her egotism was of the most innocent kind. It was more harmless than Goldsmith’s, for we cannot recall in her utterances a single envious or jealous remark. Of how many self-conscious authors can the like be said? The simple love of praise which led her to entertain her acquaintance with what was said about herself, has assisted to render her interesting to a wider circle. “Vain glory,” says Bacon quaintly, “helpeth to perpetuate a man’s memory: like unto varnish that makes ceilings not only shine, but last.” If she had strong prejudices, they were free from every taint of personal malevolence. Her dislike of the Opposition resembled Johnson’s professed hatred of the Scotch, at which the doctor himself used to laugh. She goes to the trial of Hastings, full of zeal for his cause, and spends her time there chiefly in conversing with his prosecutors. And however prejudiced on some points, she was far from narrow-minded on many matters of controversy. Though brought up a strict Protestant, she married a Roman Catholic. Though to the end of her days an attached daughter of the English Church, she expresses unqualified esteem for the piety of those very pronounced dissenters, Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld. The sympathy between herself and her own family was at all times perfect. There were no rivalries among them. “I am sure,” she wrote modestly in 1800, “my dear father will not think I mean to parallel our works.” She was extremely pleased when Queen Charlotte declared a tale published by her half-sister Sarah to be “very pretty.” Her faithfulness to duty and her friends was celebrated by her royal mistress in the saying that Miss Burney was “true as gold.” When she had cast in her lot with her Chevalier, no isolation, no privation, no anxiety for the future could make her repine. “I never forget,” she wrote in her poverty, “Dr. Johnson’s words. When somebody said that a certain person had no turn for economy, he answered, ‘Sir, you might as well say that he has no turn for honesty.’“ Whatever cavils have been raised by Croker and one or two like-minded detractors, no artifice or indirect dealing can be laid to her charge, even in literary matters, in regard to which such manœuvres are too often deemed excusable. We are not holding her up as a pattern of elevated or extraordinary virtue. She was simply the