n the impressions: and thereby give us record of
them for all time. Her acute critic "Daddy" Crisp lamented that we had
not had a series of recorders of successive _tons_ [fashions] like
Fanny. But she was much more than a mere fashion-monger: and what has
lasted best in her was not mere fashion. She could see and record life
and nature: and she did so. Still, fashion had a good deal to do with
it: and when her access to fashion and society ceased, the goodness of
her work ceased likewise.

Even this gift, and this even in _Evelina_ and the better parts of
_Cecilia_, she had not always with her. The sentimental parts of
_Evelina_--the correspondence with Mr. Villars, the courtship with Lord
Orville, and others--are very weak: and it cannot be said that Evelina
herself, though she is a pleasant girl enough, gives the lie to Mr.
Pope's libel about women. Cecilia has a little more individuality. But
the great strength of the former book lies in the admirable lower
middle-class pictures of the Branghtons and Mr. Smith, whom Fanny had
evidently studied from the life in the queer neighbourhood of Poland
Street: as also in the justness and verisimilitude of the picture of the
situation, which in different ways both books present--that of the
introduction of a young girl to the world.[13] In these points, as in
others which there is neither space nor need to particularise, Miss
Burney showed that she had hit upon--stumbled upon one may almost
say--the real principle and essence of the novel as distinguished from
the romance--its connection with actual ordinary life--life studied
freshly and directly "_from_ the life," and disguised and adulterated as
little as possible by exceptional interests and incidents. It is
scarcely too much to say that one great reason why the novel was so long
coming into existence was precisely this--that life and society so long
remained subject to these exceptional interests and incidents. It is
only within the last century or so that the "life of 'mergency" (to
adapt Mr. Chucks slightly) ceased to be the ordinary life. Addison's
"Dissenter's Diary" with its record of nothing but constitutionals and
marrow-bones, and Mr. Nisby's opinions, has simply amused half a dozen
generations. Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with the
advent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself. For these things
are, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel. Not so very
much earlier Mr. Nisby wo