the
deepest interest. At the close, after Catherine's ignominious
journey home, we are back again in the cool world of reality. The
abbey is abandoned, after it has served its purpose in
disciplining the heroine, in favour of the unromantic country
parsonage.

In _Northanger Abbey_, Jane Austen had deftly turned the novels
of Mrs. Radcliffe to comedy; but, even if her parody had been
published in 1798, when we are assured that it was completed, her
satirical treatment was too quiet and subtle, too delicately
mischievous, to have disturbed seriously the popularity of the
novel of terror. We can imagine the Isabella Thorpes and Lydia
Bennets of the day dismissing _Northanger Abbey_ with a yawn as
"an amazing dull book," and returning with renewed zest to more
stimulating and "horrid" stories. Maria Edgeworth too had aimed
her shaft at the sentimental heroine in one of her _Moral
Tales--Angelina or L'Amie Inconnue_ (1801). Miss Sarah Green, in
_Romance Readers and Romance Writers_ (1810) had displayed the
extravagant folly of a clergyman's daughter whose head was turned
by romances. Ridicule of a more blatant and boisterous kind was
needed, and this was supplied by Eaton Stannard Barrett, who, in
1813--five years before _Northanger Abbey_ appeared--published
_The Heroine or The Adventures of Cherubina_. In this farcical
romance it is clearly Barrett's intention to make so vigorous an
onslaught that "the Selinas, Evelinas, and Malvinas who faint and
blush and weep through four half-bound octavos" shall be, like
Catherine Morland, "humbled to the dust." Sometimes, indeed, his
farce verges on brutality. To expose the follies of Cherubina it
was hardly necessary to thrust her good-humoured father into a
madhouse, and this grim incident sounds an incongruous, jarring
note in a rollicking high-spirited farce. The plights into which
Cherubina is plunged are so needlessly cruel, that, while only
intending to make her ridiculous, Barrett succeeds rather in
making her pitiable. But many of her adventures are only a shade
more absurd than those in the romances at which he tilts. Regina
Maria Roche's _Children of the Abbey_ (1798) would take the wind
from the sails of any parodist. In protracting _The Heroine_
almost to wearisome length, Barrett probably acted deliberately
in mimicry of this and a horde of other tedious romances.
Certainly the unfortunate Stuart waits no longer for the
fulfilment of his hopes than Lord Mortimer,