or a Madam Duval, and each is annoyed by the malice and impertinence of a Miss Flora or the Misses Branghton.  Through their inexperience in the manners of the world and their heedlessness or ignorance of ceremony both young ladies are mortified by falling into embarrassing and awkward predicaments.  Both in the same way alarm the delicacy and almost alienate the affections of their chosen lovers.  “The chief perplexity of Mr. Trueworth, the admirer of Miss Thoughtless, arose from meeting her in company with Miss Forward, who had been her companion at a boarding-school, and of whose infamous character she was ignorant.  In like manner the delicacy of Lord Orville is wounded, and his attachment shaken, by meeting his Evelina in similar society at Vauxhall.  The subsequent visit and counsel of the lovers to their mistresses is seen, however, in a very different point of view by the heroines.”  The likeness between the plots of the two novels is indeed sufficiently striking to attract the attention of an experienced hunter for literary parallels, but unfortunately there is no external evidence to show that Miss Burney ever read her predecessor’s work.  One need only compare any two parallel characters, the common profligate, Lady Mellasin, for instance, with the delightfully coarse Madam Duval, to see how little the author of “Evelina” could have learned from the pages of Mrs. Haywood.

But if it deserves scant credit as a model for Miss Burney’s infinitely more delicate art, “Betsy Thoughtless” should still be noticed as an early attempt to use the substance of everyday life as material for fiction.  It has been called with some justice the first domestic novel in the language.  Although the exact definition of a domestic novel nowhere appears, the term may be understood—­by expanding the French roman a la tasse de the—­as meaning a realistic piece of fiction in which the heroine serves as chief protagonist, and which can be read with a teacup in one hand without danger of spilling the tea.  Mrs. Haywood indeed drew upon her old stock of love scenes tender or importunate, duels, marital disputes, and elopements to lend interest to her story, but except for the mock-marriage with a scoundrelly valet from which the imprudent Betsy is rescued in the nick of time by her former lover, no passage in the four volumes recommends itself particularly either to sense or to sensibility.  There are few high lights in “Betsy Thoughtless”; the story keeps the even and loquacious tenor of its way after a fashion called insipid by the “Monthly Review,” though the critic finally acknowledges the difficulty of the task, if not the success of the writer.  “In justice to [our author], however, this may be further observed, that no other hand would, probably, have more happily finished a work begun on such a plan, as that of the history of a young inconsiderate girl, whose little foibles, without any natural vices of the mind, involve her in difficulties and distresses, which, by correcting,