What then was it in _Evelina_, and in part in _Cecilia_ (with a faint survival even into _Camilla_), which turned the heads of such a "town" as Johnson and Burke, Walpole and Windham, and many others--which, to persons who can see it, makes the books attractive to-day, and which should always give their author a secure and distinguished place in the great torch-race of English fiction-writers? It is this--that Miss Burney had a quite marvellous faculty of taking impressions of actual speech, manners, and to a certain extent character: that she had, at any rate for a time, a corresponding faculty of expressing, or at least reporting, her impressions. Next (and perhaps most of all) that she had the luck to come at a moment when speech and manners were turning to the modern; and lastly, that she was content, in parts of her work at any rate, to let her faculty of expression work, automatically and uninterfered with, on the impressions: and thereby give us record of them for all time. Her acute critic "Daddy" Crisp lamented that we had not had a series of recorders of successive _tons_ [fashions] like Fanny. But she was much more than a mere fashion-monger: and what has lasted best in her was not mere fashion. She could see and record life and nature: and she did so. Still, fashion had a good deal to do with it: and when her access to fashion and society ceased, the goodness of her work ceased likewise. Even this gift, and this even in _Evelina_ and the better parts of _Cecilia_, she had not always with her. The sentimental parts of _Evelina_--the correspondence with Mr. Villars, the courtship with Lord Orville, and others--are very weak: and it cannot be said that Evelina herself, though she is a pleasant girl enough, gives the lie to Mr. Pope's libel about women. Cecilia has a little more individuality. But the great strength of the former book lies in the admirable lower middle-class pictures of the Branghtons and Mr. Smith, whom Fanny had evidently studied from the life in the queer neighbourhood of Poland Street: as also in the justness and verisimilitude of the picture of the situation, which in different ways both books present--that of the introduction of a young girl to the world.[13] In these points, as in others which there is neither space nor need to particularise, Miss Burney showed that she had hit upon--stumbled upon one may almost say--the real principle and essence of the novel as distinguished from the romance--its connection with actual ordinary life--life studied freshly and directly "_from_ the life," and disguised and adulterated as little as possible by exceptional interests and incidents. It is scarcely too much to say that one great reason why the novel was so long coming into existence was precisely this--that life and society so long remained subject to these exceptional interests and incidents. It is only within the last century or so that the "life of 'mergency" (to adapt Mr.