before long she was engaged to marry D'Arblay. Her father questioned the prudence of the marriage on economical grounds. General D'Arblay had lost all his fortune in the Revolution, and Fanny had little to depend on except a pension of a hundred a year granted her by the queen on her retirement. But she and her general were both content to do with little, and they were married on the 31st of July, 1793. They settled themselves in a cottage in Mr. Lock's park, and there Madame D'Arblay occupied herself, during 1794 and the greater part of 1795, in writing a novel, of which she had sketched the outline while still at court. "Camilla" was published by subscription in 1796, and it brought its author a sum of £3,000, besides a present of a hundred guineas from the king and queen. But other success it had not. The reviews were severe, and private criticism was not all that could be wished. Dr. Burney called on Horace Walpole to learn his opinion, and got cold comfort, according to Walpole's account written to Miss Berry: He asked me about deplorable "Camilla." Alas! I had not recovered of it enough to be loud in its praise. I am glad, however, to hear that she has realized about £2,000, and the worth, no doubt, of as much in honors at Windsor, where she was detained three days, and where even Mons. D'Arblay was allowed to dine. A copy lay at Beaconsfield, beside the bed on which Burke was slowly dying; and when Mrs. Crewe went to see him, he pointed to it and said, "How ill I am you will easily believe, when a new work of Madame D'Arblay's lies on my table unread!" It was by Burke's suggestion that the plan of publishing by subscription had been adopted, and his cordial reply to Mrs. Crewe, when she invited him to do his part, makes a fit conclusion to the story of Fanny Burney's literary career: As to Miss Burney - the subscription ought to be for certain persons five guineas, and to take but a single copy each. I am sure that it is a disgrace to the age and nation if this be not a great thing for her. If every person in England who has received pleasure and instruction from "Cecilia" were to rate its value at a hundredth part of their satisfaction, Madame D'Arblay would be one of the richest women in the kingdom. Her scheme was known before she lost two of her most respectful admirers from this house; and this, with Mrs. Burke's subscription and mine, make the paper I send you. One book is as good as a thousand; one of hers is certainly as good as a thousand others. The paper was a £20 note; the allu sion to the two who were gone speaks for itself. From this point the principal interests of Madame D'Arblay's life are of a domestic nature, her story is that of the happy which does not require to be written. She had brought a son into the world in the year before the publication of "Camilla," and the pleasures of maternity compensated her for the pain in. flicted by unfriendly reviewers. Mrs. Crewe wanted her to undertake the editorship of a weekly paper to be called the Breakfast Table, which should aim at "laughing the world out of Jacobinism," and give her an opening for a series of studies of life and manners. But she declined the enterprise on the ground that her husband's position obliged her to live out of the world, and society could only be painted effectively by one who lived in its midst. With the new century, new novelists of her own sex and of the school she had created came into fame and fash ion. Maria Edgeworth, who had sighed hopelessly in 1783 for the "honor of Miss Burney's correspondence," published "Castle Rackrent" and "Belinda" in 1801; in 1811, Jane Austen brought out "Sense and Sensibility." Each in her different way, and very different degree, Miss Edgeworth excelled in grasp of was a greater artist than Miss Burney. moral principles; Miss Austen was sunext place to Shakespeare is claimed for preme in literary form. But when the Jane Austen as a painter of human na ture, I cannot help asking whether in one quality Frances Burney does not come nearer to deserving this high honor. She touch than Jane Austen. painted human nature with a more genial She certainly which her successor lays bare and withwants the quiet and terrible power with ers the follies and the meannesses of mankind. But on the other hand she does what Miss Austen fails to do - she warms our hearts towards our fellowcreatures in their folly even more than in their wisdom. Her fools - and they are many- are as ridiculous and tiresome Persons as it is possible to conceive, and yet the result of jogging along with them through her voluminous novels is that, as we turn the last page, we realize that, after all, we have a kindly feeling and a sense of kin towards each and all of them. She had a pure artistic delight in charac ter, which enabled her to enjoy, and make | ford withdrawing space enough to isolate others enjoy, every genuine manifestation of it. As her husband wrote under her picture : La Raison, si souvent tranchante, atrabiliaire Toujours dans ses ecrits plait autant qu'elle éclaire, L'indulgence, l'amour, allument son flambeau, C'est la Sagesse enfin, non l'Ennui peint en beau. All her good work belongs to the eighteenth century; all her inspiration came from the day when society still had animal spirits to fortify it against boredom; when people laughed merrily because they were amused, not satirically to show themselves cleverer than the rest. But with the deeper tendencies of her age she was not in sympathy, and she had neither courage nor power to deal adequately with its serious problems. In her last novel, "The Wanderer," which appeared in 1814, she was led by the influence of the new time to attempt more profound things than she had ventured npon before, and the result was a grotesque sensationalism, even more deplorable" than the flatness of "Camilla." Madame D'Arblay died on the 6th of January, 1840, at the age of eighty-eight, having outlived her son three years and her husband two-and-twenty. Her father had died in 1814, and from 1818 to 1832 she was occupied in writing his memoirs from the papers he left behind him. MARY ELIZABETH CHRISTIE. From Longman's Magazine. THE THREE STRANGERS. AMONG the few features of agricultural England which retain an appearance but little modified by the lapse of centuries, may be reckoned the high, grassy, and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases, as they are indifferently called, that fill a large area of certain counties in the south and south-west. If any mark of human Occupation is met with hereon it usually takes the form of the solitary cottage of some shepherd. Fifty years ago such a lonely cottage stood on such a down, and may possibly be standing there now. In spite of its loneliness, however, the spot, by actual measurement, was not more than five miles from a county town. Yet, what of that? Five miles of irregular upland, during the long, inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists, af a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who "conceive and meditate of pleasant things." Some old earthen camp or barrow, some clump of trees, at least some starved fragment of ancient hedge, is usually taken advantage of in the erection of these forlorn dwellings. But, in the present case, such a kind of shelter had been disregarded. Higher Crowstairs, as the house was called, stood quite detached and undefended. The only reason for its precise situation seemed to be the crossing of two footpaths at right angles hard by, which may have crossed there and thus for a good five hundred years. The house was thus exposed to the elements on all sides. But, though the wind up here blew unmistakably when it did blow, and the rain hit hard whenever it fell, the various weathers of the winter season were not quite so formidable on the coomb as they were imagined to be by dwellers on low ground. The raw rimes were not so pernicious as in the hollows, and the frosts were scarcely so severe. When the shepherd and his family who tenanted the house were pitied for their sufferings from the exposure, they said that upon the whole they were less inconvenienced by wuzzes and flames (hoarses and phlegms) than when they had lived by the stream of a snug neighboring valley. 66 The night of March 28, 182-, was precisely one of the nights that were wont to call forth these expressions of commiseration. The level rainstorm smote walls, slopes, and hedges like the clothyard shafts of Senlac and Crecy. Such sheep and outdoor animals as had no shelter stood with their buttocks to the wind; while the tails of little birds trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blown inside-out like umbrellas. The gable-end of the cottage was stained with wet, and the eaves-droppings flapped against the wall. Yet never was commiseration for the shepherd more misplaced. For that cheerful rustic was entertaining a large party in glorification of the christening of his second girl. The guests had arrived before the rain began to fell, and they were all now assembled in the chief or living room of the dwelling. A glance into the apartment at eight o'clock on this eventful evening would have resulted in the opinion that it was as cozy and comfortable a nook as could be wished for in boisterous weather. The calling of its inhabitant was proclaimed by a number of highly polished sheep-crooks without stems that were hung ornamentally over the fireplace, the curl of each shining crook varying from the antiquated type engraved in the patriarchal pictures of old family Bibles to the most approved fashion of the last local sheep-fair. The room was lighted by half-a-dozen candles, having wicks only a trifle smaller than the grease which enveloped them, in candlesticks that were never used but at high-days, holy-days, and family feasts. The lights were scattered about the room, two of them standing on the chimney-piece. This position of candles was in itself significant. Candles on the chimney-piece always meant a party. On the hearth, in front of a back-brand to give substance, blazed a fire of thorns, that crackled "like the laughter of the fool." apt to lead on the men to such an unconscionable deal of toping that they would sometimes fairly drink the house dry. A dancing party was the alternative; but this, while avoiding the foregoing objection on the score of good drink, had a counterbalancing disadvantage in the matter of good victuals, the ravenous appetites engendered by the exercise causing immense havoc in the buttery. Shepherdess Fennel fell back upon the intermediate plan of mingling short dances with short periods of talk and singing, so as to hinder any ungovernable rage in either. But this scheme was entirely confined to her own gentle mind: the shepherd himself was in the mood to exhibit the most reckless phases of hospitality. pent. Dancing was instantaneous, Mrs. Fennel privately enjoining the players on no account to let the dance exceed the length of a quarter of an hour. The fiddler was a boy of those parts, about twelve years of age, who had a wonderful dexterity in jigs and reels, though his fingers were so small and short as to Nineteen persons were gathered here. necessitate a constant shifting for the Of these, five women, wearing gowns of high notes, from which he scrambled various bright hues, sat in chairs along back to the first position with sounds not the wall; girls shy and not shy filled of unmixed purity of tone. At seven the the window-bench; four men, including shrill tweedle-dee of this youngster had Charley Jake the hedge-carpenter, Elijah begun, accompanied by a booming groundNew the parish clerk, and John Pitcher, bass from Elijah New, the parish clerk, a neighboring dairyman, the shepherd's who had thoughtfully brought with him father-in-law, Tolled in the settle; a young his favorite musical instrument, the serman and maid who were blushing over tentative pour parlers on a life-companionship, sat beneath the corner cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions. Absolute confidence in each other's good opinion begat perfect ease, while the finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity, was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever - which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale. But Elijah and the boy, in the excitement of their position, quite forgot the injunction. Moreover, Oliver Giles, a man of seventeen, one of the dancers, who was enamored of his partner, a fair girl of thirty-three rolling years, had recklessly handed a new crown-piece to the musi cians, as a bribe to keep going as long as they had muscle and wind. Mrs. Fennel, seeing the steam begin to generate on the countenances of her guests, crossed over and touched the fiddler's elbow and put her hand on the serpent's mouth. But they took no notice, and fearing she might lose her character of genial hostess if she were to interfere too markedly, she retired and sat down helpless. And so the dance whizzed on with cumulative fury, the performers moving in their planet-like courses, direct and retrograde, from apogee to perigee, till the hand of the wellkicked clock at the bottom of the room had travelled over the circumference of an hour. While these cheerful events were in course of enactment within Fennel's pastoral dwelling, an incident having consid erable bearing on the party had occurred in the gloomy night without. Mrs. Fennel's concern about the growing fierceness of the dance corresponded in point of time with the ascent of a human figure to the solitary hill of Higher Crowstairs from the direction of the distant town. This personage strode on through the rain with. out a pause, following the little-worn path which, further on in its course, skirted the shepherd's cottage. It was nearly the time of full moon, and on this account, though the sky was lined with a uniform sheet of dripping cloud, ordinary objects out of doors were readily visible. The sad, wan light revealed the lonely pedestrian to be a man of supple frame; his gait suggested that he had somewhat passed the period of perfect and instinctive agility, though not so far as to be otherwise than rapid of motion when occasion required. In point of fact he might have been about forty years of age. He appeared tall, but a recruiting sergeant, or other person accustomed to the judging of men's heights by the eye, would have discerned that this was chiefly owing to his gauntness, and that he was not more than five feet eight or nine. Notwithstanding the regularity of his tread, there was caution in it, as in that of one who mentally feels his way; and despite the fact that it was not a black coat nor a dark garment of any sort that he wore, there was something about him which suggested that he naturally belonged to the black-coated tribes of men. His clothes were of fustian, and his boots hobnailed, yet in his progress he showed not the mud-accustomed bearing of hobnailed and fustianed peasantry. By the time that he had arrived abreast of the shepherd's premises the rain came down, or rather came along, with yet more determined violence. The outskirts of the little homestead partially broke the force of wind and rain, and this induced him to stand still. The most salient of the shepherd's domestic erections was an empty sty at the forward corner of his hedgeless garden, for in these latitudes the principle of masking the homelier features of your establishment by a conventional frontage was unknown. The traveller's eye was attracted to this small building by the pallid shine of the wet slates that covered it. He turned aside, and, finding it empty, stood under the pentroof for shelter. While he stood, the boom of the serpent within, and the lesser strains of the fiddler, reached the spot as an accompani ment to the surging hiss of the flying rain on the sod, its louder beating on the cabbage-leaves of the garden, on the eight or ten beehives just discernible by the path, and its dripping from the eaves into a row of buckets and pans that had been placed under the walls of the cottage. For at Higher Crowstairs, as at all such elevated domiciles, the grand difficulty of housekeeping was an insufficiency of water; and a casual rainfall was utilized by turning out, as catchers, every utensil that the house contained. Some queer stories might be told of the contrivances for economy in suds and dish-waters that are ab. solutely necessitated in upland habitations during the droughts of summer. But at this season there were no such exigencies: a mere acceptance of what the skies bestowed was sufficient for an abundant store. At last the notes of the serpent ceased and the house was silent. This cessation of activity aroused the solitary pedestrian from the reverie into which he had lapsed, and, emerging from the shed, with an apparently new intention, he walked up the path to the house-door. Arrived here, his first act was to kneel down on a large stone beside the row of vessels, and to drink a copious draught from one of them. Having quenched his thirst, he rose and lifted his hand to knock, but paused with his eye upon the panel. Since the dark surface of the wood revealed absolutely nothing, it was evident that he must be mentally looking through the door, as if he wished to measure thereby all the possibilities that a house of this sort might include, and how they might bear upon the question of his entry. In his indecision he turned and surveyed the scene around. Not a soul was anywhere visible. The garden path stretched downward from his feet, gleaming like the track of a snail; the roof of the little well (mostly dry), the well-cover, the top rail of the garden-gate, were varnished with the same dull liquid glaze; while, far away in the vale, a faint whiteness of more than usual extent showed that the rivers were high in the meads. Beyond all this winked a few bleared lamplights through the beating drops, lights that denoted the situation of the county town from which he had appeared to come. The absence of all notes of life in that direction seemed to clinch his intentions, and he knocked at the door. Within, a desultory chat had taken the place of movement and musical sound. The hedge-carpenter was suggesting a song to the company, which nobody just | shepherd's wife fell upon his boots, "and then was inclined to undertake, so that I am not well fitted, either. I have had the knock afforded a not unwelcome di- some rough times lately, and have been forced to pick up what I can get in the way of wearing, but I must find a suit better fit for working-days when I reach home." version. "Walk in!" said the shepherd promptly. The latch clicked upward, and out of the night our pedestrian appeared upon the door-mat. The shepherd arose, snuffed two of the nearest candles, and turned to look at bim. Their light disclosed that the stranger was dark in complexion, and not unprepossessing as to feature. His hat, which for a moment he did not remove, hung low over his eyes, without concealing that they were large, open, and determined, moving with a flash rather than a glance round the room. He seemed pleased with the survey, and, baring his shaggy head, said, in a rich deep voice, "The rain is so heavy, friends, that I ask leave to come in and rest a while." "To be sure, stranger," said the shepherd. "And faith, you've been lucky in choosing your time, for we are having a bit of a fling for a glad cause - though to be sure a man could hardly wish that glad cause to happen more than once a year." "Nor less," spoke up a woman. "For 'tis best to get your family over and done with, as soon as you can, so as to be all the earlier out of the fag o't." "And what may be this glad cause?" asked the stranger. "A birth and christening," said the shepherd. The stranger hoped his host might not be made unhappy either by too many or too few of such episodes, and being invited by a gesture to a pull at the mug, he readily acquiesced. His manner which, before entering, had been so dubious, was now altogether that of a careless and candid man. "Late to be traipsing athwart this coomb-bey?" said the engaged man of fifty. "Late it is, master, as you say. I'll take a seat in the chimney-corner, if you have nothing to urge against it, ma'am; for I am a little moist on the side that was next the rain." Mrs. Shepherd Fennel assented, and made room for the self-invited comer, who, having got completely inside the chimney-corner, stretched out his legs and his arms with the expansiveness of a person quite at home. "Yes, I am rather thin in the vamp," he said freely, seeing that the eyes of the "One of hereabouts?" she inquired. "Not quite that - further up the coun try." "I thought so. And so am I; and by your tongue you come from my neighborhood." "But you would hardly have heard of me," he said quickly. "My time would be long before yours, ma'am, you see." This testimony to the youthfulness of his hostess had the effect of stopping her cross-examination. "There is only one thing more wanted to make me happy," continued the new comer. "And that is a little baccy, which I am sorry to say I am out of." "I'll fill your pipe," said the shepherd. "I must ask you to lend me a pipe likewise." "A smoker, and no pipe about ye?" "I have dropped it somewhere on the road." The shepherd filled and handed him a new clay pipe, saying, as he did so, "Hand me your baccy-box I'll fill that too, now I am about it." The man went through the movement of searching his pockets. "Lost that too?" said his entertainer, with some surprise. "I am afraid so," said the man with some confusion. "Give it to me in a screw of paper." Lighting his pipe at the candle with a suction that drew the whole flame into the bowl, he resettled himself in the corner, and bent his looks upon the faint steam from his damp legs, as if he wished to say no more. Meanwhile the general body of guests had been taking little notice of this visitor by reason of an absorbing discussion in which they were engaged with the band about a tune for the next dance. The matter being settled, they were about to stand up, when an interruption came in the shape of another knock at the door. At sound of the same the man in the chimney-corner took up the poker and began stirring the fire as if doing it thoroughly were the one aim of his existence; and a second time the shepherd said "Walk in!" In a moment another man stood upon the straw-woven doormat. He too was a stranger. |