Disappointed at this second rebuff, the impatient aspirant gave up hope; but, her spirits reviving, after a time, her third volume was completed and copied before the end of the twelvemonth. Meanwhile, a scruple had arisen in her mind. Her correspondence with Lowndes had been carried on without her father’s knowledge; the publisher’s letters to her being addressed to Mr. Grafton, and sent to the Orange Coffee House, in Orange Street. But she now saw it to be her duty not to rush into print without Dr. Burney’s consent. Availing herself of a propitious moment, when he was bidding her good-bye before setting out on a visit to Chesington, she confessed to him, with many blushes, that she had written a little book, and hoped that he would allow her to publish it on condition of not disclosing her name. She assured him that he should not be troubled in the business, which her brother Charles would manage for her, and only begged further that he would not himself ask to see the manuscript. The Doctor was first amazed, then amused, and finally bursting into a laugh, kissed her, and bade her see that Charles was discreet, thus tacitly granting her petition. The completed work was now forwarded to Lowndes, who without much delay accepted it, and paid the author what seemed to her the magnificent sum of twenty pounds for the copyright. Much censure has been thrown on Dr. Burney for his conduct in this transaction. He ought, we are told, to have given his daughter serious counsel as to the perils of authorship, to have inquired into the merits of her production, and to have seen that she made the best possible terms with the bookseller. ‘Happily,’ says Macaulay, ‘his inexcusable neglect of duty caused her no worse evil than the loss of twelve or fifteen hundred pounds.’ We doubt if it cost her the twelfth part of the smaller sum. It is most unlikely, we think, that an untried and anonymous writer could, with the best assistance, have commanded a hundred pounds for a first attempt at fiction. We are not concerned to defend Dr. Burney, but to us he seems to have failed less in carefulness than in discernment. He could not believe his ears when Frances spoke of having a book ready for the press. He looked on her scheme of publication as an idle fancy, and doubtless was convinced that nothing would come of it. Her motive for concealing her project from him had been merely dread of his ridicule. Until ‘Evelina’ became an assured success, he had no faith in the ability of his second daughter. ‘Poor Fanny’—so he used to call her—was, in his eyes, a dutiful and affectionate child, and a useful amanuensis, and nothing more. So little did he expect ever to hear again of her embryo work, that he did not even ask its title.