hough the reverse of prudish, generous, merry, lovable. But
with all these good qualities she is not quite a person. Jenny is, I
think, a little more of one, but still not quite--while the men and the
other women are still less. Nor had Eliza mastered that practised knack
of "manners-painting" which was to stand Fanny Burney, and many another
after her, in the stead of actual character-creation. Her situations are
often very lively, if not exactly decorous; and they sometimes have a
real dramatic verisimilitude, for instance, the quarrel and
reconciliation of the Lord and the Lady in _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_;
but the higher verisimilitude of prose fiction they lack. Neither again
(though Smollett had given her a lead here) had she attained that power
of setting and furnishing a scene which is so powerful a weapon in the
novelist's armoury. Yet she had learnt much: and her later work would
have been almost a wonder in her own earlier time.

She had even been preceded in the new line by one, and closely followed
by another writer of her own sex, both of unblemished reputation, and
perhaps her superiors in intellectual quality and accomplishment, though
they had less distinct novel-faculty. Sarah Fielding, the great
novelist's sister, but herself one of Richardson's literary seraglio,
had a good deal of her brother's humour, but very little of his
constructive grasp of life. _David Simple_ (1744), her best known work,
the _Familiar Letters_ connected with it (to which Henry contributed),
and _The Governess_ display both the merit and the defect--but the
defect is more fatal to a novel than the merit is advantageous. Once
more--if the criticism has been repeated _ad nauseam_ the occasions of
it may be warranted to be much more nauseous in themselves--one looks up
for interest, and is not fed. "The Adventures" of David--whose progeny
must have been rapidly enriched and ennobled if Peter Simple was his
descendant--were "in search of a Friend," and he came upon nobody in the
least like O'Brien. It was, in fact, too early or too late for a _lady_
to write a thoroughly good novel. It had been possible in the days of
Madeleine de Scudery, and it became possible in the days of Frances
Burney: but for some time before, in the days of Sarah Fielding, it was
only possible in the ways of Afra and of Mrs. Haywood, who, without any
unjust stigma on them, can hardly be said to fulfil the idea of
ladyhood, as no doubt Miss Fielding did.