off, he has persistently refused to see, in revenge for her
mother's unfaithfulness, and the still more famous scene in _Nature and
Art_ where a judge passes the death-sentence on a woman whom he has
betrayed--have, as has been allowed, the dramatic or melodramatic
quality which attracts people in "decadent" periods. There seems,
indeed, to have been a certain decadent charm about Mrs. Inchbald
herself--with her beauty, her stage skill, her strict virtue combined
with any amount of "sensibility," her affectation of nature, and her
benevolence not in the least sham but distinctly posing. And something
of this rococo relish may no doubt, with a little good will and
sympathy, be detected in her books. But of the genuine life and the
natural language which occasionally inspirit the much more unequal and
more generally commonplace work of Miss Burney, she has practically
nothing. And she thus falls out of the main line of development, merely
exemplifying the revolutionary and sentimental episode.

We must now, for some pages, illustrate the course of the novel by minor
examples: and we may begin with a brief notice of two writers, one of
whom might have been taken before Miss Burney and the other just after
her chronologically: but who, in the order of thought and method, will
come better here. Both were natives of Scotland and both illustrate
different ways of the novel. Henry Mackenzie, an Edinburgh advocate, in
three books--the names of which at least are famous, while his friend
Sir Walter has preserved the books themselves in the collection so often
mentioned--produced, in his own youth and in rapid succession, _The Man
of Feeling_ (1771), _The Man of the World_ (1773), and _Julia de
Roubigne_ (1777). John Moore, a Glasgow physician, wrote, when he was
nearly sixty, the novel of _Zeluco_ (1786) and followed it up with
_Edward_ ten years afterwards and _Mordaunt_ (1800). Mackenzie did good
work later in the periodical essay: but his fiction is chiefly the
"sensibility"-novel of the French and of Sterne, reduced to the
absolutely absurd. From his essay-work, and from Scott's and other
accounts of him, he must have possessed humour of a kind: but the
extremely limited character of its nature and operation may be
exemplified by his representation of a whole press-gang as bursting into
tears at the pathetic action and words of an old man who offers himself
as substitute for his son. This is one of the not rare, but certainly