that Murphy and Sheridan thought so, though they were too polite to say so.  Happily Frances had a friend who was not afraid to give her pain.  Crisp, wiser for her than he had been for himself, read the manuscript in his lonely retreat, and manfully told her that she had failed, that to remove blemishes here and there would be useless, that the piece had abundance of wit but no interest, that it was bad as a whole, that it would remind every reader of the Femmes Savantes, which, strange to say, she had never read, and that she could not sustain so close a comparison with Moliere.  This opinion, in which Dr. Burney concurred, was sent to Frances in what she called a “hissing, groaning, cat-calling epistle.”  But she had too much sense not to know that it was better to be hissed and cat-called by her Daddy than by a whole sea of heads in the pit of Drury-Lane Theatre; and she had too good a heart not to be grateful for so rare an act of friendship.  She returned an answer which shows how well she deserved to have a judicious, faithful, and affectionate adviser.  “I intend,” she wrote, “to console myself for your censure by this greatest proof I have ever received of the sincerity, candour, and, let me add, esteem, of my dear daddy.  And as I happen to love myself rather more than my play, this consolation is not a very trifling one.  This, however, seriously I do believe, that when my two daddies put their heads together to concert that hissing, groaning, cat-calling epistle they sent me, they felt as sorry for poor little Miss Bayes as she could possibly do for herself.  You see I do not attempt to repay your frankness with the air of pretended carelessness.  But, though somewhat disconcerted just now, I will promise not to let my vexation live out another day.  Adieu, my dear daddy!  I won’t be mortified, and I won’t be downed; but I will be proud to find I have, out of my own family, as well as in it, a friend who loves me well enough to speak plain truth to me.”

Frances now turned from her dramatic schemes to an undertaking far better suited to her talents.  She determined to write a new tale, on a plan excellently contrived for the display of the powers in which her superiority to other writers lay.  It was in truth a grand and various picture-gallery, which presented to the eye a long series of men and women, each marked by some strong peculiar feature.  There were avarice and prodigality, the pride of blood and the pride of money, morbid restlessness and morbid apathy, frivolous garrulity, supercilious silence, a Democritus to laugh at every thing, and a Heraclitus to lament over every thing.  The work proceeded fast, and in twelve months was completed.  It wanted something of the simplicity which had been among the most attractive charms of Evelina; but it furnished ample proof that the four years which had elapsed since Evelina appeared, had not been unprofitably spent.  Those who saw Cecilia in manuscript pronounced it the best novel