show how widely he casts his net:  Mysteries of Udolpho, Romance of the Forest, Children of the Abbey, Sir Charles Grandison, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, Evelina, Camilla, Cecilia, La Nouvelle Heloise, Rasselas, The Delicate Distress, Caroline of Lichfield,[98] The Knights of the Swan,[99] The Beggar Girl, The Romance of the Highlands.[100] Besides these novels, which he actually names, Barrett alludes indirectly to several others, among them Tristram Shandy and Amelia.  From this enumeration it is evident that Barrett was satirising the heroine, not merely of the “novel of terror,” but of the “sentimental novel” from which she traced her descent.  He organises a masquerade, mindful that it is always the scene of the heroine’s “best adventure,” with Fielding’s Amelia and Miss Burney’s Cecilia and probably other novels in view.  The precipitate flight of Cherubina, “dressed in a long-skirted red coat stiff with tarnished lace, a satin petticoat, satin shoes and no stockings,” and with hair streaming like a meteor, described in Letter XX, is clearly a cruel mockery of Cecilia’s distressful plight in Miss Burney’s novel.  Even Scott is not immune from Barrett’s barbed arrows, and Byron is glanced at in the bogus antique language of “Eftsoones.”  Barrett, indeed, jeers at the mediaeval revival in its various manifestations and even at “Romanticism” generally, not merely at the new school of fiction represented by Mrs. Radcliffe, her followers and rivals.  Not content with reaching his aim, as he does again and again in The Heroine, Barrett, like many another parodist, sometimes over-reaches it, and sneers at what is not in itself ridiculous.

Nominally Cherubina is the butt of Barrett’s satire, but the permanent interest of the book lies in the skilful stage-managing of her lively adventures.  There is hardly an attempt at characterisation.  The people are mere masqueraders, who amuse us by their costume and mannerisms, but reveal no individuality.  The plot is a wild extravaganza, crammed with high-flown, mock-romantic episodes.  Cherry Wilkinson, as the result of a surfeit of romances, perhaps including The Misanthropic Parent or The Guarded Secret (1807), by Miss Smith, deserts her real father—­a worthy farmer—­to look for more aristocratic parents.  As he is not picturesque enough for a villain, she repudiates him with scorn:  “Have you the gaunt ferocity of famine in your countenance?  Can you darken the midnight with a scowl?  Have you the quivering lip and the Schedoniac contour?  In a word, are you a picturesque villain full of plot and horror and magnificent wickedness?  Ah! no, sir, you are only a sleek, good-humoured, chuckle-headed, old gentleman.”  In the course of her search she meets with amazing adventures, which she describes in a series of letters to her governess.  She changes her name to Cherubina de Willoughby, and journeys to London, where, mistaking Covent Garden Theatre