Henry Mackenzie is, after Laurence Sterne, the chief representative of the sentimental movement in English fiction. He wrote The Man of Feeling (1771) in his early twenties, and its hero, Harley, became, along with Rousseau's Saint-Preux and Goethe's Werther, the type of a sensibility too extreme to live at ease in an unfeeling world. With The Man of the World (1773) and Julia de Roubigné (1777), Mackenzie reached a place of prominence among novelists of the 1770s. Early identified with the hero of his first novel, he was an object of both adulation and criticism. Robert Burns told a correspondent in 1783 that he prized The Man of Feeling "next to the Bible," and the young Samuel Rogers, when asked by Adam Smith whom he most wished to meet in Edinburgh in 1789, replied: "The author of Julia de Roubigné." Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, disliked "the fashionable whine of...