_Memoir of Dr. Burney_, 1832. The DIARY AND LETTERS, which would embalm her memory even if EVELINA, CECILIA and _Camilla_ were lost, was published after her death, in seven volumes. The somewhat unmerciful bulk of this work has lately been judiciously reduced by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey in an edition published by Messrs. Roberts Brothers. * * * * * [Sidenote: Her childhood.] At Lynn, in June, 1752, Frances Burney was born. Nothing in her childhood indicated that she would, while still a young woman, have secured for herself an honorable and permanent place among English writers. She was shy and silent. Her brothers and sisters called her a dunce, and not altogether without some show of reason; for at eight years old she did not know her letters. [Sidenote: Education.] ... The progress of the mind of Frances Burney, from her ninth to her twenty-fifth year, well deserves to be recorded. When her education had proceeded no further than the horn-book, she lost her mother, and thenceforward she educated herself. Her father appears to have been as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate and sweet-tempered man can well be. He loved his daughter dearly, but it never seems to have occurred to him that a parent has other duties to perform to children than that of fondling them. It would indeed have been impossible for him to superintend their education himself. His professional engagements occupied him all day.... Two of his daughters he sent to a seminary at Paris; but he imagined that Frances would run some risk of being perverted from the Protestant faith if she were educated in a Catholic country, and he therefore kept her at home. No governess, no teacher of any art or of any languages was provided for her. But one of her sisters showed her how to write, and before she was fourteen she began to find pleasure in reading. [Sidenote: No novel reader.] It was not, however, by reading that her intellect was formed. Indeed, when her best novels were produced, her knowledge of books was very small. It is particularly deserving of observation, that she appears to have been by no means a novel reader. Her father’s library was large, ... but in the whole collection there was only a single novel, Fielding’s ‘Amelia.’ [Sidenote: Her peculiar opportunities.]