f
youth and childhood in _Fleetwood_. But _St. Leon_, besides its
historical shortcomings (which, once more, we may postpone), is full of
faults, from the badly managed supernatural to an only too natural
dullness and languor of general story: nor has _Fleetwood_ anything like
the absorbing power which _Caleb Williams_ exercises, in its own way and
on its own people. Yet again we may perhaps say that the chief interest
of Godwin, from our point of view, is his repeated and further weighted
testimony to the importance of the novel as an appeal to public
attention. In this respect it was in fact displacing, not only the drama
on one side, but the sermon on the other. Not so very long before these
two had almost engrossed the domain of _popular_ literature, the graver
and more precise folk habitually reading sermons as well as hearing
them, and the looser and lighter folk reading drama much oftener than
(in then-existing circumstances) they had the opportunity of seeing it.
With the novel the "address to the reader" became direct and stood by
itself. The novelist could emulate Burke with his right barrel and
Lydia Languish with his left. He certainly did not always endeavour to
profit as well as to delight: but the double power was, from this time
forward, shared by him with his brother in the higher and older
_Dichtung_.

[15] Godwin had written novel-_juvenilia_ of which few say
anything.

Next to Godwin may be placed a lady who was much adored by that curious
professor of philandering, political _in_justice, psychology, and the
use of the spunge, but who wisely put him off. Mrs. Inchbald's
(1753-1821) command of a certain kind of dramatic or at least theatrical
situation, and her propensity to Richardsonian "human-heart"-mongering,
have from time to time secured a certain number of admirers for _A
Simple Story_ (1791) and _Nature and Art_ (1796). Some, availing
themselves of the confusion between "style" and "handling" which has
recently become fashionable, have even credited her with style itself.
Of this she has nothing--unless the most conventional of
eighteenth-century phraseology, dashed with a kind of _marivaudage_
which may perhaps seem original to those who do not know Marivaux's
French followers, shall deserve the name. She is indeed very much of an
English Madame Riccoboni. But her situations--such as the meeting in _A
Simple Story_ of a father with the daughter whom, though not exactly
casting her