ound throughout her work. "Oh,
Miss Woodley!" exclaims Miss Milner, forced at last to confess to her
friend what she feels towards Dorriforth, "I love him with all the
passion of a mistress, and with all the tenderness of a wife." No young
lady, even in the eighteenth century, ever gave utterance to such a
sentence as that. It is the sentence, not of a speaker, but of a writer;
and yet, for that very reason, it is delightful, and comes to us charged
with a curious sense of emotion, which is none the less real for its
elaboration. In _Nature and Art_, Mrs. Inchbald's second novel, the
climax of the story is told in a series of short paragraphs, which, for
bitterness and concentration of style, are almost reminiscent of
Stendhal:

The jury consulted for a few minutes. The verdict was "Guilty".

She heard it with composure.

But when William placed the fatal velvet on his head and rose to
pronounce sentence, she started with a kind of convulsive motion,
retreated a step or two back, and, lifting up her hands with a
scream, exclaimed--

"Oh, not from _you!_"

The piercing shriek which accompanied these words prevented their
being heard by part of the audience; and those who heard them
thought little of their meaning, more than that they expressed
her fear of dying.

Serene and dignified, as if no such exclamation had been uttered,
William delivered the fatal speech, ending with "Dead, dead,
dead".

She fainted as he closed the period, and was carried back to
prison in a swoon; while he adjourned the court to go to dinner.

Here, no doubt, there is a touch of melodrama; but it is the melodrama
of a rhetorician, and, in that fine "She heard it with composure",
genius has brushed aside the forced and the obvious, to express, with
supreme directness, the anguish of a soul.

For, in spite of Mrs. Inchbald's artificialities, in spite of her lack
of that kind of realistic description which seems to modern readers the
very blood and breath of a good story, she has the power of doing what,
after all, only a very few indeed of her fellow craftsmen have ever been
able to do--she can bring into her pages the living pressure of a human
passion, she can invest, if not with realism, with something greater
than realism--with the sense of reality itself--the pains, the triumphs,
and the agitations of the human heart. "The heart," to use the
old-fashi