rom those ambitious scenes of distress which lie near the catastrophe
of each of those novels, than from some exquisite strokes of natural
tenderness which take us here and there by surprise. We would mention as
examples, Mrs. Hill's account of her little boy's death in Cecilia, and
the parting of Sir Hugh Tyrold and Camilla, when the honest baronet
thinks himself dying.

It is melancholy to think that the whole fame of Madame D'Arblay rests
on what she did during the earlier half of her life, and that everything
which she published during the forty-three years which preceded her
death lowered her reputation. Yet we have no reason to think that at the
time when her faculties ought to have been in their maturity they were
smitten with any blight. In The Wanderer we catch now and then a gleam
of her genius. Even in the Memoirs of her father there is no trace of
dotage. They are very bad; but they are so, as it seems to us, not from
a decay of power, but from a total perversion of power.

The truth is, that Madame D'Arblay's style underwent a gradual and most
pernicious change, a change which, in degree at least, we believe to be
unexampled in literary history, and of which it may be useful to trace
the progress.

When she wrote her letters to Mr. Crisp, her early journals, and her
first novel, her style was not indeed brilliant or energetic; but it was
easy, clear, and free from all offensive faults. When she wrote Cecilia
she aimed higher. She had then lived much in a circle of which Johnson
was the centre; and she was herself one of his most submissive
worshippers. It seems never to have crossed her mind that the style even
of his best writings was by no means faultless, and that even had it
been faultless it might not be wise in her to imitate it. Phraseology
which is proper in a disquisition on the Unities, or in a preface to a
Dictionary, may be quite out of place in a tale of fashionable life. Old
gentlemen do not criticise the reigning modes, nor do young gentlemen
make love, with the balanced epithets and sonorous cadences which, on
occasions of great dignity, a skilful writer may use with happy effect.

In an evil hour the author of Evelina took The Rambler for her model.
This would not have been wise even if she could have imitated her
pattern as well as Hawkesworth did. But such imitation was beyond her
power. She had her own style. It was a tolerably good one; and might,
without any violent change, have bee