Page li

eccentric characters, each governed by his own peculiar whim, each talking his own peculiar jargon, and each bringing out by opposition the oddities of all the rest.  We will give one example out of many which occur to us.  All probability is violated in order to bring Mr. Delville, Mr. Briggs, Mr. Hobson, and Mr. Albany into a room together.  But when we have them there, we soon forget probability in the exquisitely ludicrous effect which is produced by the conflict of four old fools, each raging with a monomania of his own, each talking a dialect of his own, and each inflaming all the others anew every time he opens his mouth.  Madame D’Arblay was most successful in comedy, and, indeed, in comedy which bordered on farce.  But we are inclined to infer from some passages, both in “Cecilia” and “Camilla,” that she might have attained equal distinction in the pathetic.  We have formed this judgment less from those ambitious’scenes of distress which lie near the catastrophe of each of those novels, than from some exquisite strokes of natural tenderness which take us, here and there, by surprise.  We would mention as examples, Mrs. Hill’s account of her little boy’s death in “Cecilia,” and the parting of Sir Hugh Tyrold and Camilla, when the honest baronet thinks himself dying.

It is melancholy to think that the whole fame of Madame D’Arblay rests on what she did during the earlier part of her life, and that everything which she published during the forty-three years which preceded her death lowered her reputation.  Yet we have no reason to think that at the time when her faculties ought to have been in their maturity, they were smitten with any blight.  In “The Wanderer,” we catch now and then a gleam of her genius.  Even in the memoirs of her father, there is no trace of dotage.  They are very bad; but they are so, as it seems to us, not from a decay of power, but from a total perversion of power.  The truth is, that Madame D’Arblay’s style underwent a gradual and most pernicious change-a change which, in degree at least, we believe to be unexampled in literary history, and of which it may be useful to trace the progress.  When she wrote her letters to Mr. Crisp, her early journals and her’first novel, her style was not, indeed, brilliant or energetic ; but it was easy, clear, and free from all offensive thoughts.  When she wrote “Cecilia” she aimed higher.  She had then lived much in a circle of which Johnson was the centre; and she was herself one of his most submissive worshippers.  It seems never to have crossed her mind that the style even of his best writings was by no means faultless and that even had it been faultless, it might not be wise in her to imitate it.  Phraseology which is proper in a disguisition on the Unities or in a preface to a dictionary, may be quite out of place in a tale of fashionable life.  Old gentlemen do not criticise the reigning modes, nor do

Page lii