[1] There is some difficulty here as to the chronology.  “This
    sacrifice,” says the editor of the Diary, “was made in the young
    authoress’s fifteenth year.”  This could not be; for the sacrifice
    was the effect, according to the editor’s own showing, of the
    remonstrances of the second Mrs. Burney; and Frances was in her
    sixteenth year when her father’s second marriage took place.

She now hemmed and stitched from breakfast to dinner with scrupulous regularity.  But the dinners of that time were early; and the afternoon was her own.  Though she had given up novel-writing, she was still fond of using her pen.  She began to keep a diary, and she corresponded largely with a person who seems to have had the chief share in the formation of her mind.  This was Samuel Crisp, an old friend of her father.  His name, well known, near a century ago, in the most splendid circles of London, has long been forgotten.

Crisp was an old and very intimate friend of the Burneys.  To them alone was confided the name of the desolate old hall in which he hid himself like a wild beast in a den.  For them were reserved such remains of his humanity as had survived the failure of his play.  Frances Burney he regarded as his daughter.  He called her his Fannikin, and she in return called him her dear Daddy.  In truth, he seems to have done much more than her real father for the development of her intellect; for though he was a bad poet, he was a scholar, a thinker, and an excellent counsellor.  He was particularly fond of Dr. Burney’s concerts.  They had, indeed, been commenced at his suggestion, and when he visited London he constantly attended them.  But when he grew old, and when gout, brought on partly by mental irritation, confined him to his retreat, he was desirous of having a glimpse of that gay and brilliant world from which he was exiled, and he pressed Fannikin to send him full accounts of her father’s evening parties.  A few of her letters to him have been published; and it is impossible to read them without discerning in them all the powers which afterwards produced Evelina and Cecilia, the quickness in catching every odd peculiarity of character and manner, the skill in grouping, the humour, often richly comic, sometimes even farcical.

Fanny’s propensity to novel-writing had for a time been kept down.  It now rose up stronger than ever.  The heroes and heroines of the tales which had perished in the flames, were still present to the eye of her mind.  One favourite story, in particular, haunted her imagination.  It was about a certain Caroline Evelyn, a beautiful damsel who made an unfortunate love match, and died, leaving an infant daughter.  Frances began to imagine to herself the various scenes, tragic and comic, through which the poor motherless girl, highly connected on one side, meanly connected on the other, might have to pass.  A crowd of unreal beings, good and bad, grave and ludicrous, surrounded the pretty, timid,