A book called _Self Control_, which appeared in 1810, by Mary Brunton, the wife of a Scotch minister, had a fair measure of success, and was reprinted as lately as 1852. Jane speaks very slightingly of it: “I am looking over _Self Control_ again, and my opinion is confirmed of its being an excellently meant, elegantly written work, without anything of nature or probability in it. I declare I do not know whether Laura’s passage down the American river is not the most natural possible every-day thing she ever does.” Miss Mitford in regard to this book quotes the opinions of two men, one of whom said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman and the other that it ought to be written in letters of gold, which shows that public opinion was as various in those days as it is in these. In 1807, Jane mentions _Clarentine_, a novel of Sarah Burney’s, who was a younger sister of the famous Miss Burney; though the same author brought out another novel later, it was evidently only because she followed in her sister’s wake, and not from any inherent ability. Jane says, “We are reading _Clarentine_ and are surprised to find how foolish it is. I remember liking it much less on a second reading than at the first, and it does not bear a third at all. It is full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties, without striking merit of any kind.” But these impressions of long-forgotten books are hardly worth recording, except as specimens of the quantities of worthless novels to be had at the libraries then. Samuel Rogers says, “Lane made a large fortune by the immense quantity of trashy novels which he sent forth from the Minerva press. I perfectly well remember the splendid carriage in which he used to ride, and his footmen with their cockades and gold-headed canes. Now-a-days as soon as a novel has had its run, and is beginning to be forgotten, out comes an edition of it as a standard novel.” In Miss Mitford’s Life is given a list of the books which she had from the circulating library in a month, and which she presumably read, when she was a girl just back from school. It is here quoted as, with one or two exceptions, the titles tell the style of work in vogue. “St. Margaret’s Cave; St. Claire of the Isles; Scourge of Conscience; Emma Corbett; Poetical Miscellany; Vincenza; A Sailor’s Friendship and a Sailor’s Love; The Castles of Athlin and Dumbayn; Polycratia; Travels in Africa; Novice of St. Dominick; Clarentina; Leonora; Count de Valmont; Letters of a Hindu Rajah; Fourth Vol. of Canterbury Tales; The Citizen’s Quarter; Amazement; Midnight Weddings; Robert and Adela; The Three Spaniards; De Clifford.”