We have mentioned a few of the most eminent of those who paid their homage to the author of Evelina.  The crowd of inferior admirers would require a catalogue as long as that in the second book of the Iliad.  In that catalogue would be Mrs. Cholmondeley, the sayer of odd things, and Seward, much given to yawning, and Baretti, who slew the man in the Haymarket, and Paoli, talking broken English, and Langton, taller by the head than any other member of the club, and Lady Millar, who kept a vase wherein fools were wont to put bad verses, and Jerningham, who wrote verses fit to be put into the vase of Lady Millar, and Dr. Franklin—­ not, as some have dreamed, the great Pennsylvanian Dr. Franklin, who could not then have paid his respects to Miss Burney without much risk of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, but Dr. Franklin the less—­

  [Greek:  Aias
  meion, outi tosos ge osos Telamonios Aias,
  alla polu meion.]

It would not have been surprising if such success had turned even a strong head, and corrupted even a generous and affectionate nature.  But, in the Diary, we can find no trace of any feeling inconsistent with a truly modest and amiable disposition.  There is, indeed, abundant proof that Frances enjoyed, with an intense, though a troubled, joy, the honours which her genius had won; but it is equally clear that her happiness sprang from the happiness of her father, her sister, and her dear Daddy Crisp.  While flattered by the great, the opulent, and the learned, while followed along the Steyne at Brighton and the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells by the gaze of admiring crowds, her heart seems to have been still with the little domestic circle in St. Martin’s Street.  If she recorded with minute diligence all the compliments, delicate and coarse, which she heard wherever she turned, she recorded them for the eyes of two or three persons who had loved her from infancy, who had loved her in obscurity, and to whom her fame gave the purest and most exquisite delight.  Nothing can be more unjust than to confound these outpourings of a kind heart, sure of perfect sympathy, with the egotism of a blue-stocking, who prates to all who come near her about her own novel or her own volume of sonnets.

It was natural that the triumphant issue of Miss Burney’s first venture should tempt her to try a second.  Evelina, though it had raised her fame, had added nothing to her fortune.  Some of her friends urged her to write for the stage.  Johnson promised to give her his advice as to the composition.  Murphy, who was supposed to understand the temper of the pit as well as any man of his time, undertook to instruct her as to stage-effect.  Sheridan declared that he would accept a play from her without even reading it.  Thus encouraged she wrote a comedy named The Witlings.  Fortunately it was never acted or printed.  We can, we think, easily perceive from the little which is said on the subject in the Diary, that The Witlings would have been damned, and