a hundred years later and was asked about a hundred years before), “Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers of romance are women?” And it starts with a burlesque account of a certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, “What then? to add to my earthly miseries am I to be called Peggy?  My name is Margari_tt_a!” “I am sure that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit.”  But this promise of something to complete the trio with Northanger Abbey and The Heroine (to be presently mentioned) is not maintained.  Not only does the writer force the note of parody too much by making “Margaritta” say to herself, “Poor persecuted dove that I am,” and adore a labourer’s shirt on a hedge, but she commits the far more fatal fault of exchanging her jest for earnest.  Margaritta—­following her romance-models—­falls a victim to an unprincipled great lady and the usual wicked baronet—­at whose head, one is bound to say, she flings herself with such violence as no baronet could possibly resist.  Her sister Mary, innocent of romance-reading and all other faults, is, though not as guilty, as unlucky almost as Margaret:  and by far the greater part of the book is an unreal presentment, in nearly the worst manner of the eighteenth century itself, of virtuous curates, unvirtuous “tonish” rectors, who calmly propose to seduce their curates’ daughters (an offence which, for obvious reasons, must, in the worst times, have been unusual), libertine ladies, and reckless “fashionables” of all kinds.  The preface and the opening create expectations, not merely of amusement but of power, which are by no means fulfilled.  It is “S.G.” who asserts that Ida of Athens “has brought a blush to the cheek of many,” and one can only repeat the suggested substitution.

The only faults that can be found with The Heroine or The Adventures of Cherubina, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, which appeared in the same year, with no very different object and subject, though written in lighter vein, are one that it could not help and another that it could.  Unjustly, but unavoidably, the first is the worst.  That it is a burlesque rather overdone—­a burlesque burlesque—­not in the manner of Thackeray, but in that of some older and some more recent writers—­is unfortunate, but not fatal.  One can forgive—­one can even enjoy—­the ghost who not only sneezes but says, “D—­n, all is blown!” When the heroine is actually locked up with a man in a chest one is more doubtful:  recovering when the Marquis de Furioso, “bowing gracefully to the bride,” stabs himself to the heart, which is almost “the real Mackay” as they say in the North.  The slight awkwardness of snow falling the day after the characters have been eating strawberries does not amuse us much, because this is a comparatively ordinary event of the early twentieth century, whatever it might be of the early nineteenth.  But what is fatal, though the author could not help it, is that the infinitely lighter, more artistic, and more lethal dart of Northanger Abbey had been launched by the pen, if not the press, more than a dozen years before.