du Christianisme, or Atala, or Rene, or Les Martyrs.  She had very little inventive power; her best novel, Evelina, has no plot worth speaking of.  She never wrote really well.  Even the Diary derives its whole charm from the matter and the reportage.  Evelina is tolerable style of the kind that has no style; Cecilia is pompous and Johnsonian; Camilla was stigmatised by the competent and affectionate judgment of Mrs. Delany as “Gallicised;” and The Wanderer is in a lingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French original by a person who does not know English.

[12] Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that intense concentration on herself and her family with which, after their quarrel, Mrs. Thrale, not quite an impartial judge, but a very shrewd one, charged her, and which does appear in the Diary.

What then was it in Evelina, and in part in Cecilia (with a faint survival even into Camilla), which turned the heads of such a “town” as Johnson and Burke, Walpole and Windham, and many others—­which, to persons who can see it, makes the books attractive to-day, and which should always give their author a secure and distinguished place in the great torch-race of English fiction-writers?  It is this—­that Miss Burney had a quite marvellous faculty of taking impressions of actual speech, manners, and to a certain extent character:  that she had, at any rate for a time, a corresponding faculty of expressing, or at least reporting, her impressions.  Next (and perhaps most of all) that she had the luck to come at a moment when speech and manners were turning to the modern; and lastly, that she was content, in parts of her work at any rate, to let her faculty of expression work, automatically and uninterfered with, on the impressions:  and thereby give us record of them for all time.  Her acute critic “Daddy” Crisp lamented that we had not had a series of recorders of successive tons [fashions] like Fanny.  But she was much more than a mere fashion-monger:  and what has lasted best in her was not mere fashion.  She could see and record life and nature:  and she did so.  Still, fashion had a good deal to do with it:  and when her access to fashion and society ceased, the goodness of her work ceased likewise.

Even this gift, and this even in Evelina and the better parts of Cecilia, she had not always with her.  The sentimental parts of Evelina—­the correspondence with Mr. Villars, the courtship with Lord Orville, and others—­are very weak:  and it cannot be said that Evelina herself, though she is a pleasant girl enough, gives the lie to Mr. Pope’s libel about women.  Cecilia has a little more individuality.  But the great strength of the former book lies in the admirable lower middle-class pictures of the Branghtons and Mr. Smith, whom Fanny had evidently studied from the life in the queer neighbourhood