irable spirit and force of those scenes in which she was
content to be familiar.

But there was to be a still deeper descent. After the publication of
Camilla, Madame D'Arblay resided ten years at Paris. During those years
there was scarcely any intercourse between France and England. It was
with difficulty that a short letter could occasionally be transmitted.
All Madame D'Arblay's companions were French. She must have written,
spoken, thought, in French. Ovid expressed his fear that a shorter exile
might have affected the purity of his Latin. During a shorter exile,
Gibbon unlearned his native English. Madame D'Arblay had carried a bad
style to France. She brought back a style which we are really at a loss
to describe. It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous _patois_,
bearing the same relation to the language of Rasselas, which the
gibberish of the negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of
Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say, the vilest
parts, of Mr. Gait's novels; sometimes of the perorations of Exeter
Hall; sometimes of the leading articles of the Morning Post. But it most
resembles the puffs of Mr. Rowland and Dr. Goss. It matters not what
ideas are clothed in such a style. The genius of Shakespeare and Bacon
united would not save a work so written from general derision.

It is only by means of specimens that we can enable our readers to
judge how widely Madame D'Arblay's three styles differed from each
other.

The following passage was written before she became intimate with
Johnson. It is from Evelina:--

"His son seems weaker in his understanding, and more gay in his
temper; but his gayety is that of a foolish overgrown schoolboy,
whose mirth consists in noise and disturbance. He disdains his
father for his close attention to business and love of money, though
he seems himself to have no talents, spirit, or generosity to make
him superior to either. His chief delight appears to be in
tormenting and ridiculing his sisters, who in return most cordially
despise him. Miss Branghton, the eldest daughter, is by no means
ugly; but looks proud, ill-tempered, and conceited. She hates the
city, though without knowing why; for it is easy to discover she has
lived nowhere else. Miss Polly Branghton is rather pretty, very
foolish, very ignorant, very giddy, and, I believe, very
good-natured."

This is not a fine style, but