[Footnote 189:  It would be difficult to find a more bare-faced and impudent literary theft than the case in which Sterne appropriated to himself the remonstrance of Burton ("Anatomy of Melancholy"), against that very plagiarism which he (Sterne) was then committing.  Burton said:  “As apothecaries, we make new mixtures, every day pour out of one vessel into another * * * We weave the same web, still twist the same rope again and again.”  Sterne says, with an effrontery all his own:  “Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new medicines, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?  Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope—­forever in the same track? forever at the same pace?” For Sterne’s plagiarism, see Dr. Ferriar’s “Essay and Illustrations,” also Scott’s “Life of Sterne.”]

[Footnote 190:  “Tristram Shandy,” orig. ed., vol. viii, chap. 8.]

[Footnote 191:  “Rasselas,” chap. xliv.  Contrast with Porter on “The Human Intellect,” pp. 371-2.]

[Footnote 192:  See Scott’s “Memoir of Johnson.”]

[Footnote 193:  “The Reverie,” “The History of Arbaces,” “The Pilgrim,” “The History of John Juniper.”]

[Footnote 194:  The facts of Brooke’s life are taken from the introduction to the “Fool of Quality,” by Rev. Charles Kingsley, New York, 1860.]

[Footnote 195:  Charles Kingsley, preface to the “Fool of Quality.”]

[Footnote 196:  Kingsley’s preface to “Fool of Quality.”]

[Footnote 197:  “Alwyn,” “Anna St. Ives,” “Hugh Trevor,” “Bryan Perdue.”]

[Footnote 198:  Published in 1817, when the author was far advanced in years.]

III.

The publication of “Evelina,” in 1778, made a sensation which the merits of the work fully justified.  The story of Miss Burney’s[199] early life, her furtive attempts at fictitious composition, the great variety of artistic and political characters who passed in review before her observant eyes at Dr. Burney’s house have been made familiar by her own diary and letters.  Petted and admired by Johnson, Mrs. Thrale, and the brilliant literary society of which they formed the centre, she lived sufficiently far into the present century to see the works of her early friends enrolled among the classics or consigned to oblivion, and to recognize that the approval of posterity had been added to the early fame of her own writings.  As a very young girl, unnoticed by the distinguished persons who frequented her father’s house, she had studied with careful attention the characters and manners of those who talked and moved about her.  A strong desire to reproduce the impressions which filled her mind induced Miss Burney in her sixteenth year to devote her stolen hours of seclusion to fictitious composition.  Discouraged in her early efforts by her stepmother, her habits of observation remained active, and took form, when the authoress was twenty five years old, in the famous novel of “Evelina.”  The book was issued secretly and anonymously, the publisher even being ignorant of the writer’s true name.  But the immediate popularity and admiration which greeted the work soon led to its open acknowledgment by the happy young authoress.