Next to Godwin may be placed a lady who was much adored by that curious professor of philandering, political injustice, psychology, and the use of the spunge, but who wisely put him off.  Mrs. Inchbald’s (1753-1821) command of a certain kind of dramatic or at least theatrical situation, and her propensity to Richardsonian “human-heart"-mongering, have from time to time secured a certain number of admirers for A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796).  Some, availing themselves of the confusion between “style” and “handling” which has recently become fashionable, have even credited her with style itself.  Of this she has nothing—­unless the most conventional of eighteenth-century phraseology, dashed with a kind of marivaudage which may perhaps seem original to those who do not know Marivaux’s French followers, shall deserve the name.  She is indeed very much of an English Madame Riccoboni.  But her situations—­such as the meeting in A Simple Story of a father with the daughter whom, though not exactly casting her off, he has persistently refused to see, in revenge for her mother’s unfaithfulness, and the still more famous scene in Nature and Art where a judge passes the death-sentence on a woman whom he has betrayed—­have, as has been allowed, the dramatic or melodramatic quality which attracts people in “decadent” periods.  There seems, indeed, to have been a certain decadent charm about Mrs. Inchbald herself—­with her beauty, her stage skill, her strict virtue combined with any amount of “sensibility,” her affectation of nature, and her benevolence not in the least sham but distinctly posing.  And something of this rococo relish may no doubt, with a little good will and sympathy, be detected in her books.  But of the genuine life and the natural language which occasionally inspirit the much more unequal and more generally commonplace work of Miss Burney, she has practically nothing.  And she thus falls out of the main line of development, merely exemplifying the revolutionary and sentimental episode.

We must now, for some pages, illustrate the course of the novel by minor examples:  and we may begin with a brief notice of two writers, one of whom might have been taken before Miss Burney and the other just after her chronologically:  but who, in the order of thought and method, will come better here.  Both were natives of Scotland and both illustrate different ways of the novel.  Henry Mackenzie, an Edinburgh advocate, in three books—­the names of which at least are famous, while his friend Sir Walter has preserved the books themselves in the collection so often mentioned—­produced, in his own youth and in rapid succession, The Man of Feeling (1771), The Man of the World (1773), and Julia de Roubigne (1777).  John Moore, a Glasgow physician, wrote, when he was nearly sixty, the novel of Zeluco (1786) and followed it up with Edward ten years afterwards