38 
*« The mutual nod the grave disguise, 
Of hearts with gladness brimming o’er 
With some unbidden tears that rise, 
For names once heard but now no more ; 
Tears brightened by the serenade 
For infant in the cradle laid.” 
From Goldsmith, the brilliant Bohemian, 
‘‘Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll,” 
we turn to Queen Charlotte’s lady attendant, Miss Frances Burney, 
afterwards Madame D’Arblay, the authoress of “Evelina” (1778) 
and “Cecilia” (1791), who was famous for her conversation in her 
old age, but never ‘soared with the angels” in her writings. She 
is now probably better known to most through her diary and its 
review by Lord Macaulay, than by actual perusal of her novels ; 
and, except as pictures of old-world life and manners, I do not 
know why these should now be read, although they had merit 
enough to excite the enthusiastic praise of such contemporary 
critics as Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke. They may have been 
right in singling her out for praise in her age and generation, for 
in the fifty years that elapsed between the publication of the 
“Vicar of Wakefield” in 1764, and “Waverley” in 1814, I do not 
remember any novelists’ reputations which have survived to our 
day, except those of Miss Burney and Mrs. Radcliffe, if indeed 
such faint vitality as they retain can fairly be called a survival. Her 
father, Dr. Charles Burney, the author of the “History of Music,” 
was born in 1726, and she herself died in 1840, at the age of 
eighty-eight, so that the joint lives of father and daughter covered 
the whole period which elapsed between the death of George I. 
and the birth of his great-great-great-great grand-daughter, the 
Princess Royal, an interval of seven generations. She tells her 
story, as Richardson did, in a series of letters; and Evelina’s account 
of a conversation between some fine ladies and gentlemen at the 
pump-room at Bath, is a fair specimen of the author’s style, while 
the conversation itself, though a trifle rougher, is not much more 
vapid than many which might be heard in very good company 
at this day. 
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