The revolutionary principles of Mrs. Smith's novels were soon forgotten, but two new elements were introduced by her that bore fruit in English fiction. Her great gift to the novel was the portrayal of refined, quiet, intellectual ladies, beside whom Evelina and Cecilia seem but school-girls. Her heroines may be poor, they may be of inferior rank, but they are always ladies of sensitive nature and cultivated manners, and are drawn with a feeling and tenderness which no novelist before her had reached. A contemporary said of Emmeline, "All is graceful, and pleasing to the sight, all, in short, is simple, femininely beautiful and chaste." This might be said of all the women she has created. Old Mrs. Rayland, the central personage in her most popular novel, _The Old Manor House_, notwithstanding her exalted ideas of her own importance as a member of the Rayland family, and the arbitrary manner in which she compels all to conform to her old-fashioned notions, is always the high-born lady. We smile at her, but she never forfeits our respect. Scott said of her, "Old Mrs. Rayland is without a peer." Mrs. Smith's second gift to the novel was her charming descriptions of rural scenery. Nature had for a long time been banished from the arts. Wordsworth in one of his prefaces wrote: "Excepting _The Nocturnal Reverie_ of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage or two in the _Windsor Forest_ of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of _Paradise Lost_ and _The Seasons_ does not contain a single new image of external nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one, from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination." Fiction was as barren of scenery as poetry. None of the novelists were cognisant of the country scenes amid which their plots were laid, with the possible exception of Goldsmith. _The Vicar of Wakefield_ has a rural setting, and there are references to the trees, the blackbirds, and the hayfields; but description is not introduced for the sake of its own beauty as in the novels of Charlotte Smith. In _Ethelinda_ there are beautiful descriptions of the English Lakes, part of the scene being laid at Grasmere; _Celestina_ is in the romantic Provence; _Desmond_ in Normandy; and in _The Old Manor House_ we have the soft landscape of the south of England. In _The Old Manor House_ she thus describes one of the paths that led from the gate of the park to Rayland Hall: