nt. She had _not_ a fine understanding: though she was
neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her
sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as
Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say)
her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them,
are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely
substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred
some forgotten rubbish called _Henry and Frances_ to the _Vicar of
Wakefield_: and that, when a woman, she deliberately offended
Chateaubriand by praising the _Itineraire_ rather than the _Genie du
Christianisme_, or _Atala_, or _Rene_, or _Les Martyrs_. She had very
little inventive power; her best novel, _Evelina_, has no plot worth
speaking of. She never wrote really well. Even the _Diary_ derives its
whole charm from the matter and the _reportage. Evelina_ is tolerable
style of the kind that has no style; _Cecilia_ is pompous and
Johnsonian; _Camilla_ was stigmatised by the competent and affectionate
judgment of Mrs. Delany as "Gallicised;" and _The Wanderer_ is in a
lingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French original
by a person who does not know English.

[12] Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that
intense concentration on herself and her family with which,
after their quarrel, Mrs. Thrale, not quite an impartial judge,
but a very shrewd one, charged her, and which does appear in the
_Diary_.

What then was it in _Evelina_, and in part in _Cecilia_ (with a faint
survival even into _Camilla_), which turned the heads of such a "town"
as Johnson and Burke, Walpole and Windham, and many others--which, to
persons who can see it, makes the books attractive to-day, and which
should always give their author a secure and distinguished place in the
great torch-race of English fiction-writers? It is this--that Miss
Burney had a quite marvellous faculty of taking impressions of actual
speech, manners, and to a certain extent character: that she had, at any
rate for a time, a corresponding faculty of expressing, or at least
reporting, her impressions. Next (and perhaps most of all) that she had
the luck to come at a moment when speech and manners were turning to the
modern; and lastly, that she was content, in parts of her work at any
rate, to let her faculty of expression work, automatically and
uninterfered with, o