Miss Burney's last two novels, _Camilla, or a Picture of Youth_ and _The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties_, have no claim to a place among English classics. It is strange that, as she saw more of life, she depicted it with less accuracy. This might seem to show that her first novels owe their excellence to her vivid imagination rather than to her powers of observation. Her weary life at court as second keeper of the robes to Queen Charlotte; her marriage to Monsieur D'Arblay, and the sorrows that came to her as the wife of a French refugee; all her deeper experiences of life during the fourteen years between the publication of _Cecilia_ and _Camilla_--these had completely changed her light, humorous view of externals, and with that loss her power as an artist disappeared. _Camilla_ has several heroines whose love affairs interest the reader. It thus bears a resemblance to Miss Austen's novels, who speaks of it with admiration and was, perhaps, influenced by it. Eugenia, who has received the education of a man, is pleasing. Clermont Lynmere, like Mr. Smith and Sir Robert Floyer, imagines that all the ladies are in love with him. Sir Hugh Tyrold, with his love for the classics and his regret that he had not been beaten into learning them when he was a boy, his strict ideas of virtue and his desire to make everybody happy, is well conceived, but the outlines are not strong enough to make him a living character. _Camilla_ shows more than _Cecilia_ the style of Dr. Johnson. It is heavy and slow, the words are long, and many of them of Latin derivation. It was not until the year 1814, the year of _Waverley_, that her last novel, _The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties_, was published, which, following the style of _Camilla_, was in five volumes. It was partly founded on incidents arising out of the French Revolution. The book was eagerly awaited; the publishers paid fifteen hundred guineas for it; but even the friendliest critic pronounced it a literary failure. To sum up, Macaulay in the essay before quoted makes clear Miss Burney's place in fiction: "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 humour, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. 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 ... we owe to her not only _Evelina_, _Cecilia_, and _Camilla_, but also _Mansfield Park_ and _The Absentee_." CHAPTER IV Hannah More