Having always felt a warm and sincere, though not a blind admiration for her talents, we rejoiced to learn that her Diary was about to be made public.  Our hopes, it is true, were not unmixed with fears.  We could not forget the fate of the Memoirs of Dr. Burney, which were published ten years ago.  The unfortunate book contained much that was curious and interesting.  Yet it was received with a cry of disgust, and was speedily consigned to oblivion.  The truth is, that it deserved its doom.  It was written in Madame D’Arblay’s later style—­the worst style that has ever been known among men.  No genius, no information, could have saved from proscription a book so written.  We, therefore, open the Diary with no small anxiety, trembling lest we should light upon some of that peculiar rhetoric which deforms almost every page of the Memoirs, and which it is impossible to read without a sensation made up of mirth, shame and loathing.  We soon, however, discovered to our great delight that this Diary was kept before Madame D’Arblay became eloquent.  It is, for the most part, written in her earliest and best manner; in true woman’s English, clear, natural, and lively.  The two works are lying side by side before us, and we never turn from the Memoirs to the Diary without a sense of relief.  The difference is as great as the difference between the atmosphere of a perfumer’s shop, fetid with lavender water and jasmine soap, and the air of a heath on a fine morning in May.  Both works ought to be consulted by every person who wishes to be well acquainted with the history of our literature and our manners.  But to read the Diary is a pleasure; to read the Memoirs will always be a task.

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The progress of the mind of Frances Burney, from her ninth to her twenty-fifth year, well deserves to be recorded.  When her education had proceeded no further than the horn-book, she lost her mother, and thenceforward she educated herself.  Her father appears to have been as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate, and sweet-tempered man can well be.  He loved his daughter dearly; but it never seems to have occurred to him that a parent has other duties to perform to children than that of fondling them.  It would indeed have been impossible for him to superintend their education himself.  His professional engagements occupied him all day.  At seven in the morning he began to attend his pupils, and, when London was full, was sometimes employed in teaching till eleven at night.  He was often forced to carry in his pocket a tin box of sandwiches, and a bottle of wine and water, on which he dined in a hackney-coach while hurrying from one scholar to another.  Two of his daughters he sent to a seminary at Paris; but he imagined that Frances would run some risk of being perverted from the Protestant faith if she were educated in a Catholic country, and he therefore kept her at home.  No governess, no teacher of any art or of any language, was provided for her.  But one of her sisters showed her how to write; and, before she was fourteen, she began to find pleasure in reading.