anything, an execrable prose
translation from very flat French verse. "Ah, Manuel!" exclaims one of
her heroines, "I am now amply punished by the Marquis for all my cruelty
to Duke Cordunna--he to whom my father in my infancy betrothed me, and to
whom I willingly pledged my faith, hoping to wed; till Romono, the
Marquis of Romono, came from the field of glory, and with superior
claims of person as of fame, seized on my heart by force, and perforce
made me feel I had never loved till then." Which is the more
surprising--that actors could be found to utter such speeches, or that
audiences could be collected to applaud them? Perhaps, for us, the most
memorable fact about Mrs. Inchbald's dramatic work is that one of her
adaptations (from the German of Kotzebue) was no other than that
_Lovers' Vows_ which, as every one knows, was rehearsed so brilliantly
at Ecclesford, the seat of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenshaw, in Cornwall,
and which, after all, was _not_ performed at Sir Thomas Bertram's. But
that is an interest _sub specie aeternitatis_; and, from the temporal
point of view, Mrs. Inchbald's plays must be regarded merely as
means--means towards her own enfranchisement, and that condition of
things which made possible _A Simple Story._ That novel had been
sketched as early as 1777; but it was not completely written until 1790,
and not published until the following year. A second edition was printed
immediately, and several more followed; the present reprint is taken
from the fourth, published in 1799--but with the addition of the
characteristic preface, which, after the second edition, was dropped.
The four small volumes of these early editions, with their large type,
their ample spacing, their charming flavour of antiquity, delicacy, and
rest--may be met with often enough in secluded corners of secondhand
bookshops, or on some neglected shelf in the library of a country
house. For their own generation, they represented a distinguished title
to fame. Mrs. Inchbald--to use the expression of her biographer--"was
ascertained to be one of the greatest ornaments of her sex." She was
painted by Lawrence, she was eulogized by Miss Edgeworth, she was
complimented by Madame de Stael herself. She had, indeed, won for
herself a position which can hardly be paralleled among the women of the
eighteenth century--a position of independence and honour, based upon
talent, and upon talent alone. In 1796 she published _Nature and Art_,
and ten