It may seem iniquitous to say that some tolerably good novel-writers must be more summarily treated than some bad ones here: but there is reason for it. Such, for instance, as Charlotte Smith and the Miss Lees are miles above such others as the just-mentioned polyonymous "Rosa," as Sarah Wilkinson, or as Henrietta Mosse-Rouvière. The first three would make a very good group for a twenty-page causerie. Charlotte Smith, who was tolerably expert in verse as well as prose; who anticipated, and perhaps taught, Scott in the double use of the name "Waverley"; and whose _Old Manor House_ (1793) is a solid but not heavy work of its kind--is something of a person in herself, but less of a figure in history, because she neither innovates nor does old things consummately. Harriet and Sophia Lee claimed innovation for the latter's _Recess_ (1783-1786), as Miss Porter did for _Thaddeus of Warsaw_, but the claim can be even less allowed. There is nothing of real historical spirit, and very little goodness of any kind, in _The Recess. The Canterbury Tales_ (1797-1805) (so named merely because they are supposed to be told by different persons) were praised by Byron, as he praised the _Percy Anecdotes_ and other things--either irresponsibly or impishly. They are not exactly bad: but also as far as possible from consummateness. On the other hand, _The Convent of Grey Penitents_, one of the crops which rewarded Miss Wilkinson for tilling the lands of her imagination with the spade of her style, _is_ very nearly consummate--in badness. It is a fair example of the worst imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe and Mat Lewis conjointly, though without the latter's looseness. The Marquis di Zoretti was an Italian nobleman--"one of those characters in whose bosom resides an unquenchable thirst of avarice" ["_thirst_ of _avarice_" is good!], etc. He marries, however, a lovely signora of the odd name of Rosalthe, without a fortune, "which circumstance was overlooked by his lordship" for a very short time only. He plots to be free of her: she goes to England and dies there to the genteelest of slow music. Their son Horatio falls in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured by wicked arts in the "Convent of Grey Penitents," tormented by the head, Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth. The book, if harmless, is about as worthless as a book can be: but it represents, very fairly, the ruck, if not indeed even the main body, of the enormous horde of romances which issued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, and which, in their different action on persons of genius, gave us _Zastrozzi_ on the one side and _Northanger Abbey_ on the other.