In England, again, the interest gradually wanes to the close of the writer's life. Yet there are passages of this later record which display, perhaps, more literary skill of the conscious sort than any of the earlier parts. The adventure at Ilfracombe, for example, is told with an art at once realistic and imaginative, and the tale of her husband's death has over it a quiet and ineffable pathos. Macaulay has written harshly of the petrified style adopted by Mme. D'Arblay in her declining years. The censure is deserved, no doubt; and yet for sheer beauty of words she never wrote anything comparable to this expression of her feelings when she heard that the long-delayed end had fallen: "How I bore this is still marvellous to me! I had always believed such a sentence would at once have killed me. But his sight-the sight of his stillness, kept me from distraction! Sacred he appeared, and his stillness I thought should be mine, and be inviolable." There were twenty-one years of memory yet before her, and her own release did not come until the extreme age of eighty-eight.

A "little character-monger" Johnson had called her in her youth, and no phrase can better describe the trait which lends interest to this long Diary. Nowhere else in English will you find anything just like this series of portraits, in which the eccentricities and mannerisms of the age are caught up with so unerring a fidelity and so gentle a malice. In this respect, the two of

her novels which still live, Evelina and Cecilia, are properly mere excursions in the more realistic transcript of life. Occasionally, to be sure, there is a passage of capital narration, but it is always of a purely personal sort. What we miss in the Diary and the novels alike is any note of passion and any immediate reflection on life, and only this limitation prevents her work from ranking with the great French autobiographies, with which a comparison most naturally occurs. Fanny was a prude, we are told, and she was also, I fear, something of a snob, but the fault did not lie entirely in her own character. Not a little of it must be charged to the state of English society. The fact is, she was a victim of that peculiarly British worship of the social order which from the days of Hobbes had been slowly permeating the national consciousness. That worship was not incompatible with sound statesmanship, or with profound political philosophy as in the case of Burke; it did not lessen the manly independence of a Johnson, and it could serve to whet the barbed arrows of a Walpole. But on a yielding, feminine character such as Miss Burney's its influence was almost omnipotent, so that her prudishness and her snobbery became not so much individual as national; and they are, one must admit, none the less easy to stomach for that reason. There was an actual dead line for her mind. Custom lay like a crust between what was proper and what was unspeak

able. Above were the family, the State, the Church, the social order; below were gathered all the ruinous emotions of the untamed heart, not the immoral or indecent things, merely, for these, as a matter of fact, might be harmless among gentlemen, but the passionate, rebellious things that create their own law. Richardson had been able to show the working of that seething underworld without shocking society, but only by throwing the burden of responsibility on poor Clarissa's shoulders as the result of filial disobedience. With our Fanny that crust never for a moment really breaks, and her satire kates over the surface of life with unfaltering dexterity.

If this were all, we might call her modest rather than prudish; but into that same forbidden limbo is relegated every immediate and penetrating reflection; it is as if the reverend Constitution of the land had been builded on the law, Thou shalt not think the thing that has not been thought. English literature as a body has alas! served that law only too well, and we turn elsewhither for quick and logical thought; but in this long diary the lack is unusually apparent. I cannot recall in all the eight volumes of this record kept for seventy-three years a single sentence that shows any immediate reaction of the writer's mind on the troublesome problems of existence. She seems to have passed through the world without experience and without questioning; and at the end we still think of her as

the girl, very English and very innocent, scribbling her satire in the protection of the great Sir Isaac's observatory. Perhaps we cover up her defects by remembering that Newton himself, despite his mightiness in science, was but a child when he came to reflect on human life; and certainly there are few more entertaining books and few names fairer and dearer to us than hers.

NOTE ON "DADDY" CRISP

If any evidence, further than Fanny Burney's Diary, is necessary to show the entire distortion of Macaulay's picture of Samuel Crisp as a wild beast in his lair, it is abundantly forthcoming in a collection of letters written by Crisp from Chessington to his sister, Mrs. Sophia Crisp Gast, at Burford, and now edited by Mr. W. H. Hutton. Crisp was a disappointed man, no doubt, and weariness of the world, as much as the need of economising money and health, led him to make his home at Chesington (as it was then spelled), where there was only one "safe route across the wild common," to which he gave the clew to his friends as a secret. But there was nothing morose in his character, nothing peevish in his retirement. There is a greater measure of truth in the epitaph which Dr. Burney wrote for his friend, and which may still be read in the village church:

"Reader, this cold and humble spot contains
The much lamented, much revered remains
Of one whose wisdom, learning, taste and sense
Good humour'd art and wide benevolence
Cheer'd and enlighten'd all this hamlet round
Wherever genius, worth, or want was found.

To few it is that bounteous Heav'n imparts

Such depth of knowledge, and such taste in arts,
Such penetration and enchanting powers
Of brightening social and convivial hours.
Had he through life been blest by Nature kind
With health robust of body as of mind,

With skill to serve and charm mankind so great
In Arts, in Science, Letters, Church or State,
His name the Nation's annals had enroll'd,
And virtues to remotest ages told."

Like most letters of the age, these of "Daddy" Crisp have a good deal to say about his own health and his correspondent's. "I stand in the first place," he writes, "totally self-condemned for my own notorious indolence and disuse of exercise through the whole winter, besides a most senseless disregard to a proper diet of regimen, for the sake of indulging appetite for the present moment.” No wonder that he feels "that hollow inside," and cries out "That old Adam is a powerful obstinate antagonist!" (with an emphasis of capitals which I forego). Clearly, Fanny's friend was not made for the battle of life, either with theatre-managers or with his own unruly members. It is clear, too, that he was tender of himself, fearing exposure, and loving the chimney corner. So he writes to his sister, "Dear Sop," that he will be glad if certain people do not visit him and put him out with their comings and goings. "Besides," he adds, "this cold weather, I want to creep into the fire myself, in my own great chair, and not be obliged to do the honours &c.; whereas, I make Jem [Capt. James Burney] and Fanny make room for me, and never mind them, nor put myself the least out of my way for them." It is the very perfection of the grumbling, frileux, habit-ridden, but warm-hearted old bachelor. When he is invited by the Thrales to Streatham, where Fanny and the great Samuel are staying, this