of Poland Street:  as also in the justness and verisimilitude of the picture of the situation, which in different ways both books present—­that of the introduction of a young girl to the world.[13] In these points, as in others which there is neither space nor need to particularise, Miss Burney showed that she had hit upon—­stumbled upon one may almost say—­the real principle and essence of the novel as distinguished from the romance—­its connection with actual ordinary life—­life studied freshly and directly “from the life,” and disguised and adulterated as little as possible by exceptional interests and incidents.  It is scarcely too much to say that one great reason why the novel was so long coming into existence was precisely this—­that life and society so long remained subject to these exceptional interests and incidents.  It is only within the last century or so that the “life of ’mergency” (to adapt Mr. Chucks slightly) ceased to be the ordinary life.  Addison’s “Dissenter’s Diary” with its record of nothing but constitutionals and marrow-bones, and Mr. Nisby’s opinions, has simply amused half a dozen generations.  Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with the advent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself.  For these things are, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel.  Not so very much earlier Mr. Nisby would have had a chance of delivering his opinions on the scaffold:  and his disciple would have had prison bread and water for marrow-bones and “Brooks and Hellier.”  These would have been subjects for romance:  the others were subjects for novel.

[13] Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a good deal of plagiarism in Evelina from Miss Betsy Thoughtless:  but it is exactly in this life-quality that the earlier novelist fails.

All glory, therefore, be to Frances Burney; both that which her generous successor and superior gives her in Northanger Abbey, and more also—­for Miss Austen, naturally enough, was not taking the view-point of literary history.  But it has been said that Fanny herself possessed her gift in two senses uncertainly—­first, in that she did not very clearly perceive what it was, and, secondly, in that she soon lost grip of it.  It is, therefore, not wonderful that few others caught the trick from her for a long time—­for indeed fully twenty years, till Miss Edgeworth made her appearance.  But these twenty years were years of extreme fertility in novels of different sorts, while—­a phenomenon that occurs not seldom—­the older kind of fiction made a kind of rally at the very time that the newer was at last solidly establishing itself.  There was, indeed, ample room for both.  You cannot kill Romance:  it would be a profound misfortune, perhaps the profoundest that could befall the human race, if you could.  But the new romance was of rather a bastard kind, and it showed more of the bad blood than of the good till, by a curious coincidence, Scott once more found the true strain, just about the same time as that at which Miss Austen was making known the true strain of the novel proper.