though not from that favour, for five years: and was a thoroughly happy woman, rejoicing in husband and child. Even when the impossible _Wanderer_ was concocted, she had had ample leisure, had as yet incurred none of her later domestic sorrows, and was assured of lavish recompense for her (it must be said) absolutely worthless labours. Why this steady declension, with which, considering the character of _Cecilia_, the court sojourn can have had nothing to do? And admitting it, why still uphold, as the present writer does uphold, _Evelina_ as one of the _points de repère_ of the English novel? Both questions shall be answered in their order. Frances Burney must have been, as we see not merely from external testimony, but from the infallible witness of her own diary, a most engaging person to any one who could get over her shyness and her prudery:[12] but she was only in a very limited sense a gifted one. Macaulay grants her a "fine understanding;" but even his own article contradicts the statement, which is merely one of his exaggerations for the sake of point. She had _not_ a fine understanding: though she was neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say) her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them, are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred some forgotten rubbish called _Henry and Frances_ to the _Vicar of Wakefield_: and that, when a woman, she deliberately offended Chateaubriand by praising the _Itinéraire_ rather than the _Génie du Christianisme_, or _Atala_, or _René_, or _Les Martyrs_. She had very little inventive power; her best novel, _Evelina_, has no plot worth speaking of. She never wrote really well. Even the _Diary_ derives its whole charm from the matter and the _reportage. Evelina_ is tolerable style of the kind that has no style; _Cecilia_ is pompous and Johnsonian; _Camilla_ was stigmatised by the competent and affectionate judgment of Mrs. Delany as "Gallicised;" and _The Wanderer_ is in a lingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French original by a person who does not know English. [12] Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that intense concentration on herself and her family with which, after their quarrel, Mrs. Thrale, not quite an impartial judge, but a very shrewd one, charged her, and which does appear in the _Diary_.