Mrs. Sheridan's place in literature rests upon _Sidney Biddulph_. This novel was an innovation in English fiction. Nearly one hundred years earlier, Madame de Lafayette had written _The Princess of Clèves_, one of the most nearly perfect novels that has ever been written, and the first that depended for its interest, not alone on what was done, but on the subtle workings of the human heart which led to the doing of it. From that time the novels of French women were largely introspective. English women, however, were either less interested in the inner life, or more reserved in laying bare its secrets. _Sidney Biddulph_ was the first English novel of this kind, and it left no definite trace on fiction, although it was the favourite novel of Charlotte Smith and had some slight effect upon her writings, and Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Opie, and Mary Brunton noted the feelings of their characters. Not until _Jane Eyre_ was published, long after Mrs. Sheridan had been forgotten, was there any great English novel of the inner life. In its day _Sidney Biddulph_ was exceedingly popular on the continent of Europe as well as in England. It was translated into German, and an adaptation of it was made in French by the Abbé Prévost, under the title, _Memoirs pour servir a l'histoire de la vertu_. But after all, Sidney's sorrows were not real, or she herself was not real; and we of to-day smile or yawn over the pages that drew tears from the eyes of the mighty Dr. Johnson. * * * * * Notwithstanding the many excellencies of English fiction during the middle of the eighteenth century, it was held in low repute. There had been many writers attempting to portray real life who, without the genius of the greater novelists, could imitate only their faults. In the preface to _Polly Honeycomb_, which was acted at Drury Lane theatre in 1760, George Colman, the author, gives the titles of about two hundred novels whose names appeared in a circulating library at that time. _Amorous Friars, or the Intrigues of a Convent_; _Beauty put to its Shifts, or the Young Virgin's Rambles_; _Bubbled Knights, or Successful Contrivances, plainly evincing, in two Familiar Instances lately transacted in this Metropolis, the Folly and Unreasonableness of Parents Laying a Restraint upon their Children's Inclinations in the Affairs of Love and Marriage_; _The Impetuous Lover, or the Guiltless Parricide_; these are the titles of a few of the popular books of that period. Colman in the character of Polly Honeycomb, an earlier Lydia Languish, attempts to show the moral effects of such reading. Her head had been so turned by these books that her father exclaims, "A man might as well turn his daughter loose in Covent-Garden, as trust the cultivation of her mind to A CIRCULATING LIBRARY."