simple, perspicuous, and agreeable. We now
come to Cecilia, written during Miss Burney's intimacy with Johnson; and
we leave it to our readers to judge whether the following passage was
not at least corrected by his hand:--

"It is rather an imaginary than an actual evil, and though a deep
wound to pride, no offence to morality. Thus have I laid open to you
my whole heart, confessed my perplexities, acknowledged my
vainglory, and exposed with equal sincerity the sources of my doubts
and the motives of my decision. But now, indeed, how to proceed I
know not. The difficulties which are yet to encounter I fear to
enumerate, and the petition I have to urge I have scarce courage to
mention. My family, mistaking ambition for honor, and rank for
dignity, have long planned a splendid connection for me, to which,
though my invariable repugnance has stopped any advances, their
wishes and their views immovably adhere. I am but too certain they
will now listen to no other. I dread, therefore, to make a trial
where I despair of success. I know not how to risk a prayer with
those who may silence me by a command."

Take now a specimen of Madame D'Arblay's later style. This is the way in
which she tells us that her father, on his journey back from the
Continent, caught the rheumatism:--

"He was assaulted, during his precipitated return, by the rudest
fierceness of wintry elemental strife; through which, with bad
accommodations and innumerable accidents, he became a prey to the
merciless pangs of the acutest spasmodic rheumatism, which barely
suffered him to reach his home, ere, long and piteously, it confined
him, a tortured prisoner, to his bed. Such was the check that almost
instantly curbed, though it could not subdue, the rising pleasure of
his hopes of entering upon a new species of existence--that of an
approved man of letters; for it was on the bed of sickness,
exchanging the light wines of France, Italy, and Germany, for the
black and loathsome potions of the Apothecaries' Hall, writhed by
darting stitches, and burning with fiery fever, that he felt the
full force of that sublunary equipoise that seems evermore to hang
suspended over the attainment of long-sought and uncommon felicity,
just as it is ripening to burst forth with enjoyment!"

Here is a second passage from Evelina:--

"Mrs. Selwyn is very