ank and
file of the novelists of 1800-1830, has been a matter of some difficulty
in the peculiar circumstances of the case. I have, however, been enabled
to read, for the first time or afresh, examples not merely of those
writers who have preserved any notoriety, but of some who have not, and
to assure myself on fair grounds that I need not wait for further
exploration. The authors now to be dealt with have already been named.
But I may add another novelist on the very eve of 1830, Auguste Ricard,
whose name I never saw in any history of literature, but whose work fell
almost by accident into my hands, and seems worth taking as "pot-luck."

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Mme. de Montolieu--_Caroline de Lichtfield_.]

Isabelle de Montolieu--a Swiss by birth but a French-woman by
extraction, and Madame de Crousaz by her first marriage--was a friend of
Gibbon's friend Georges Deyverdun, and indeed of Gibbon himself, who,
she says, actually offered to father her novel. Odd as this seems, there
really is in _Caroline de Lichtfield_[60] not merely something which
distinguishes it from the ordinary "sensibility" tale of its time (it
was first printed at Lausanne in 1786), but a kind of crispness of
thought now and then which sometimes does suggest Gibbon, in something
the same way as that in which Fanny Burney suggests Johnson. This is
indeed mixed with a certain amount of mere "sensibility" jargon,[61] as
when a lover, making a surprisingly honest confession to his beloved,
observes that he is going "to destroy those sentiments which had made
him forget how unworthy he was of them," or when the lady (who has been
quite guiltless, and has at last fallen in love with her own husband)
tells this latter of her weakness in these very engaging words: "Yes! I
did love Lindorf; _at least I think I recognise some relation between
the sentiments I had for him and those that I feel at present_!"

[Sidenote: Its advance on "Sensibility."]

A kind of affection was avowed in the last volume for the "Phoebus" of
the "heroics," and something similar may be confessed for this "Jupiter
Pluvius," this mixture of tears and stateliness, in the Sentimentalists.
But Madame de Montolieu has emerged from the most _larmoyante_ kind of
"sensible" comedy. If her book had been cut a little shorter, and if
(which can be easily done by the reader) the eccentric survival of a
_histoire_, appended instead of episodically inserted, w