Absolutely no help presents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a conveyancer, who, in some way not very consonant with the usual etiquette of his profession, has been mixed up with her father’s affairs—­a man middle-aged, apparently dry as his own parchments, and quite unversed in society.  He helps her clumsily but lavishly:  and her uncle forces her to accept his hand as the only means of saving her father from jail first and an asylum afterwards.  The inevitable disunion, brought about largely by Danby’s mother (an awful old middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and-head incident mentioned above is brought about by her seeing the (false) announcement of her old lover’s death in the paper.  But she herself is consistently, perhaps excessively, but it is fair to say not ridiculously, angelic; Danby is a gentleman and a good fellow at heart; and of course, after highly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph.  The greatest danger is threatened, and the actual happy ending brought about, by an auxiliary plot, in which the actors are the old lover (two old lovers indeed), his wife (a beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia’s school-fellow and dearest friend), and a wicked “Duke of C.”

Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discover where the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if he anticipates the strong ones without knowing the book.  As was formerly noticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction.  The date of the story is 1809:  and the author had for that period a fairly safe pattern in Miss Austen:  but she does not use it at all, nor does she make the lingo frankly that of her own day.  There are gross improbabilities—­Mr. Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business, and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham’s liabilities by handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel.  The inhuman uncle and the licentious duke are mere cardboard characters:  and the featherheaded Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan.  There is too much chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a good many other things.  And yet, somehow or other, there are also things very rarely to be found in any novel—­even taking in Bulwer and the serious part of Dickens—­up to the date.  The scene between Danby and his mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is impressingly good:  it is not