Here the “Diary” stops for the present.(22) We will, therefore, bring our narrative to a speedy close, by rapidly recounting the most important events which we know to have befallen Madame d’Arblay during the latter part of her life.

M. D’Arblay’s fortune had perished in the general wreck of the French Revolution ; -and in a foreign country his talents, whatever they may have been, could scarcely make him rich.  The task of providing for the family devolved on his wife.  In the year 1796, she published by subscription her third novel, “Camilla.”  It was impatiently expected by the public; and the sum which she obtained for it was, we believe, greater than had ever at that time been received for a novel.

We have heard that she had cleared more than three thousand guineas.  But we give this merely as a rumour.(23) “Camilla,” however, never attained popularity like that which “Evelina” and “Cecilia” had enjoyed; and it must be allowed that there was a perceptible falling off, not, indeed, in humour or in power of portraying character, but in grace and in purity of style.

We have heard that, about this time, a tragedy by Madame D’Arblay was performed without success.  We do not know whether it was ever printed ; nor, indeed, have we had time to make any researches into its history or merits.(24)

During the short truce which followed the treaty of Amiens, M. D’Arblay visited France.  Lauriston and La Fayette represented his claims to the French government, and obtained a ’Promise that he should be reinstated in his military rank.  M. D’Arblay, however, insisted that he should never be ’required to serve against the countrymen of his wife.  The First Consul, of course, would not hear of such a condition, and ordered the general’s commission to be instantly revoked.

Madame D’Arblayjoined her husband at Paris, a short time before the war of 1803 broke out, and remained in France ten years, cut off from almost all intercourse with the land of her

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birth.  At length, when Napoleon was on his march to Moscow, she with great difficulty obtained from his ministers permission to visit her own country, in company with her son, who was a native of England.  She returned in time to receive the last blessing of her father, who died in his eighty-seventh year.  In 1814 she published her last novel, “The Wanderer,” a book which no judicious friend to her memory will attempt to draw from the oblivion into which it has justly fallen.(25) In the same year her son Alexander was sent to Cambridge.  He obtained an honourable place among the wranglers of his year, and was elected a fellow of Christ’s college.  But his reputation at the University was higher than might be inferred from his success in academical contests.  His French education had not fitted him for the examinations of the Senate house; but, in pure mathematics, we have been assured by some of his competitors that he had very few equals.  He went into the Church, and it was thought likely that he would attain high eminence as a preacher; but he died before his mother, All that we have heard of him leads us to believe that he was such a son as such a mother deserved to have.’  In 1831, Madame D’Arblay published the memoirs of her father; and on the sixth of January, 1840, she died in her eighty-eighth year.