destroyed yours?"

[Sidenote: Her other work--_Milady Catesby_.]

All Madame Riccoboni's work is, with a little good-will, more or less
interesting. Much of it is full of italics, which never were used so
freely in France as in England, but which seem to suit the queer,
exaggerated, topsy-turvyfied sentiments and expressions very well. The
_Histoire d'Ernestine_ in particular is a charming little novelette. But
if it were possible to give an abstract of any of her work here, _Milady
Catesby_, which does us the honour to take its scene and personages from
England, would be the one to choose. _Milady Catesby_ is well worth
comparing with _Evelina_, which is some twenty years its junior, and the
sentimental parts of which are quite in the same tone with it. Lord
Ossery is indeed even more "sensible" than Lord Orville, but then he is
described in French. Lady Catesby herself is, however, a model of the
style, as when she writes--

Oh! my dear Henrietta! What agitation in my senses! what
trouble in my soul!... I have seen him.... He has spoken to
me.... Himself.... He was at the ball.... Yes! he. Lord
Ossery.... Ah! tell me not again to see him.... Bid me not
hear him once more.

That will do for Lady Catesby, who really had no particular occasion or
excuse for all this excitement except Sensibility. But Sensibility was
getting more and more exacting. The hero of a novel must always be in
the heroics, the heroine in a continual state of palpitation. We are
already a long way from Madame de la Fayette's stately passions, from
Marianne's whimsical _minauderies_. All the resources of
typography--exclamations, points, dashes--have to be called in to
express the generally disturbed state of things. Now unfortunately this
sort of perpetual tempest in a teacup (for it generally is in a teacup)
requires unusual genius to make it anything but ludicrous. I myself have
not the least desire to laugh when I read such a book as _La Nouvelle
Heloise_, and I venture to think that any one who does laugh must have
something of the fool and something of the brute in his composition. But
then Rousseau is Rousseau, and there are not many like him. At the
Madame Riccobonis of this world, however clever they may be, it is
difficult not to laugh, when they have to dance on such extraordinary
tight ropes as those which Sensibility prescribed.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Beaumont--_Lettres du Marquis de Roselle_.]

The writers