It is not only on account of the intrinsic merit of Madame D’Arblay’s early works that she is entitled to honorable mention. Her appearance is an important epoch in our literary history. ‘Evelina’ was the first tale written by a woman, and purporting to be a picture of life and manners, that lived or deserved to live. Indeed, most of the popular novels which preceded ‘Evelina’ were such as no lady would have written; and many of them were such as no lady could without confusion own that she had read. Miss Burney did for the English novel what Jeremy Collier did for the English drama; and she did it in a better way. She first showed that a tale might be written in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life of London might be exhibited with great force, and with broad comic humor, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with rigid morality. She took away the reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. She vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters. The fact that she has been surpassed gives her an additional claim to our respect and gratitude; for, in truth, we owe to her, not only ‘Evelina,’ ‘Cecilia,’ and ‘Camilla,’ but also ‘Mansfield Park’ and the ‘Absentee.’ LORD MACAULAY: ‘Essay on Mme. D’Arblay.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Plan of work.] [Sidenote: Her heroes and heroines.] The very gift that first made Miss Burney’s reputation now stands in the way of her popularity. She was so completely mistress of the art of letting her personages reveal their own characters, that she could afford to dispense to an unusual extent with the showman’s part. She constructed her personages not from within (as is the modern fashion) but by means of a thousand minute touches showing their conversation and behavior in an infinite variety of such small circumstances as make up the daily round of existence. She positively reveled in descriptive _minutiæ_ of this sort. Nothing was too trivial for her, nothing too intricate in the web of petty embarrassments and mortifications and misunderstandings, that make the sum of a vast majority of human lives, and a tremendous factor of the remainder. Thanks to unusually buoyant spirits and a never-flagging sense of the ridiculous, she was constantly amused where others are only bored; and according to the infallible rule that, given the necessary powers of expression, authors never bore till they are bored themselves, she was able to make amusing to others the commonplace things that afforded entertainment to herself. Moreover, her success in her own day was quite as much due to the fact that her material was commonplace as to the keen perception of character, and the racy humor she displayed in working it up. Only the chosen few might appreciate her literary skill, but it needed no special gifts of culture to enter into the agitations of Evelina’s first ball.