ought deplorable, infinitely worse than
_Cecilia_, which was not so good as _Evelina_, was an instant success.
Within a month Madame d'Arblay had made L2,000, and Macaulay's estimate
of her whole profits was over three thousand guineas. There was never a
stranger climb down a ladder to fortune than Fanny Burney's. _Evelina_,
her first and incomparably her best novel, brought her L30; _Cecilia_,
her next, L250; then came _Camilla_; and her last novel, _The Wanderer_,
which she wrote after ten years' absence with her husband in France,
actually sold 3,600 copies in six months at two guineas a copy, and was
an absolute and hopeless failure.

Camilla Lacey, invisible from the road, has been enlarged and altered to
look like nothing the d'Arblays knew. Juniper Hall has also changed, but
the splendid cedars which stand round its lawns must have been familiar
to Talleyrand and Madame de Stael. They have grown curiously slowly;
they do not strike one as larger than many trees which are known to be
not more than a hundred and twenty years old--those, for instance, at
Farnham Castle; but John Timbs, in his _Promenade Round Dorking_,
written in 1823, speaks of them as "immense," and as "said to be of the
finest growth in England."

[Illustration: _Cedars at Juniper Hall._]

Norbury Park also has its famous trees. The Druids' Walk, a path running
under enormous yews, is no longer open to the public. But Louis
Jennings, thirty years ago, saw the trees and preserved a memory of
them in _Field Paths and Green Lanes_:--

"As the path descends the shadows deepen, and you arrive at a spot
where a mass of yews of great size and vast age stretch up the hill,
and beyond to the left as far as the eye can penetrate through the
obscurity. The trees in their long and slow growth have assumed many
wild forms, and the visitor who stands there towards evening, and
peers into that sombre grove, will sometimes yield to the spell
which the scene is sure to exercise on imaginative natures; he will
half fancy that these ghostly trees are conscious creatures, and
that they have marked with mingled pity and scorn the long
processions of mankind come and go like the insects of a day,
through the centuries during which they have been stretching out
their distorted limbs nearer and nearer to each other. Thick fibrous
shoots spring out from their trunks, awakening in the memory
long-forgotten storie