espect his integrity and
benevolence; and we hope that he will not suffer political avocations so
entirely to engross him, as to leave him no leisure for literature and
philosophy.

ON MADAME D'ARBLAY

[From _The Edinburgh Review_, January, 1843]

ART. IX.--_Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay_. 5 vols. 8vo. London,
1842.

Though the world saw and heard little of Madame D'Arblay during the last
forty years of her life, and though that little did not add to her fame,
there were thousands, we believe, who felt a singular emotion when they
learned that she was no longer among us. The news of her death carried
the minds of men back at one leap, clear over two generations, to the
time when her first literary triumphs were won. All those whom we have
been accustomed to revere as intellectual patriarchs, seemed children
when compared with her; for Burke had sate up all night to read her
writings, and Johnson had pronounced her superior to Fielding, when
Rogers was still a schoolboy, and Southey still in petticoats. Yet more
strange did it seem that we should just have lost one whose name had
been widely celebrated before any body had heard of some illustrious men
who, twenty, thirty, or forty years ago, were, after a long and splendid
career, borne with honour to the grave. Yet so it was. Frances Burney
was at the height of fame and popularity before Cowper had published his
first volume, before Person had gone up to college, before Pitt had
taken his seat in the House of Commons, before the voice of Erskine had
been once heard in Westminster Hall. Since the appearance of her first
work, sixty-two years had passed; and this interval had been crowded,
not only with political, but also with intellectual revolutions.
Thousands of reputations had, during that period, sprung up, bloomed,
withered, and disappeared. New kinds of composition had come into
fashion, had gone out of fashion, had been derided, had been forgotten.
The fooleries of Della Crusca, and the fooleries of Kotzebue, had for a
time bewitched the multitude, but had left no trace behind them; nor had
misdirected genius been able to save from decay the once flourishing
school of Godwin, of Darwin, and of Radcliffe. Many books, written for
temporary effect, had run through six or seven editions, and had then
been gathered to the novels of Afra Behn, and the epic poems of Sir
Richard Blackmore. Yet the early works of Madame D'Arblay, in spite of
the lapse