is effected out of the
mouths of the bearers by a narrator of great power. I suspect that some
novelists repressed their power under a rule that a narrative should
narrate, and that the dramatic should be confined to the drama.

I make no exception in favor of Miss Burney;[431] though she was the
forerunner of a new era. Suppose a country {191} in which dress is always
of one color; suppose an importer who brings in cargoes of blue stuff, red
stuff, green stuff, etc., and exhibits dresses of these several colors,
that person is the similitude of Miss Burney. It would be a delightful
change from a universal dull brown, to see one person all red, another all
blue, etc.; but the real inventor of pleasant dress would be the one who
could mix his colors and keep down the bright and gaudy. Miss Burney's
introduction was so charming, by contrast, that she nailed such men as
Johnson, Burke, Garrick, etc., to her books. But when a person who has read
them with keen pleasure in boyhood, as I did, comes back to them after a
long period, during which he has made acquaintance with the great novelists
of our century, three-quarters of the pleasure is replaced by wonder that
he had not seen he was at a puppet-show, not at a drama. Take some
_labeled_ characters out of our humorists, let them be put together into
one piece, to speak only as labeled: let there be a Dominie with nothing
but "Prodigious!" a Dick Swiveller with nothing but adapted quotations; a
Dr. Folliott with nothing but sneers at Lord Brougham;[432] and the whole
will pack up into one of Miss Burney's novels.

Maria Edgeworth,[433] Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan),[434] Jane Austen,[435]
Walter Scott,[436] etc., are all of our century; as {192} are, I believe,
all the Minerva Press novels, as they were called, which show some of the
power in question. Perhaps dramatic talent found its best encouragement in
the drama itself. But I cannot ascertain that any such power was directed
at the multitude, whether educated or uneducated, with natural mixture of
character, under the restraints of decorum, until the use of it by two
religious writers of the school called "evangelical," Hannah More and
Rowland Hill.[437] The _Village Dialogues_, though not equal to the
_Repository Tracts_, are in many parts an approach, and perhaps a copy;
there is frequently humorous satire, in that most effective form,
self-display. They were published in 1800, and, partly at least, by the
Religious