Fanny herself, there are two simple reasons why it could not.  First, she was writing her journal for the entertainment of old Mr. Crisp of Chessington, the “Daddy Crisp” of her best pages; secondly, it is not at all likely that she knew of anything to unfold.  Nor, for that matter, was Fanny herself of the kind that can unfold to another person.  Yet there is a charm all over the book, which some may place here, some there, but which all will confess.  For me it is not so much that Fanny herself is a charming girl, and a girl of shrewd observation, of a pointed pen, and an admirable gift of mimicry.  She has all that, and more—­she has a good heart.  Her sister Susan is as good as she, and there are many of Susan’s letters.  But the real charm of the book, I think, is in the series of faithful pictures it contains of the everyday round of an everyday family.  Dutch pictures all—­passers-by, a knock at the front door, callers—­Mr. Young, “in light blue embroidered with silver, a bag and sword, and walking in the rain”; a jaunt to Greenwich, a concert at home—­the Agujari in one of her humours; a masquerade—­a very private one, at the house of Mr. Laluze....  Hetty had for three months thought of nothing else ... she went as a Savoyard with a hurdy-gurdy fastened round her waist.  Nothing could look more simple, innocent and pretty.  “My dress was a close pink Persian vest covered with a gauze in loose pleats....”  What else?  Oh, a visit to Teignmouth—­Maria Allen now Mrs. Ruston; another to Worcester; quiet days at King’s Lynn, where “I have just finished Henry and Frances ... the greatest part of the last volume is wrote by Henry, and on the gravest of grave subjects, and that which is most dreadful to our thoughts, Eternal Misery....”  Terrific novel:  but need I go on?  There may be some to whom a description of the nothings of our life will be as flat as the nothings themselves—­but I am not of that party.  The things themselves interest me, and I confess the charm.  It is the charm of innocence and freshness, a morning dew upon the words.

The Burneys, however, can do no more for us than shed that auroral dew.  They cannot reassure us of our normal humanity, since they needed reassurance themselves.

Where, then, shall we turn?  So far as I am aware, to two only, except for two others whom I leave out of account.  Rousseau is one, for it is long since I read him, but my recollection is that the Confessions is a kind of novel, pre-meditated, selective, done with great art.  Marie Bashkirtseff is another.  I have not read her at all.  Of the two who remain I leave Pepys also out of account, because, though it may be good for us to read Pepys, it is better to have read him and be through with it.  There, under the grace of God, go a many besides Pepys, and among them every boy who has ever befouled a wall with a stump of pencil.  We are left then with one whom it is ill to name in the same fill of the inkpot, “Wordsworth’s exquisite sister,” as Keats, who saw her once, at once knew her to be.