of country life, both of them mixed up with so much Billingsgate as required a strong flavour of wit to make them tolerable. Richardson had covered acres of canvass with his faithful family pictures, Mrs. Radcliffe had dipped up to the elbows in horrors; while Miss Burney's fashionable gossip, and Miss Edgeworth's Hogarth drawings of the prose— not the poetry—of life and character, had each and all found favour in their respective ways. But a work now appeared in which the author swept over the whole range of character with entire freedom as well as fidelity, ennobling the whole by high historic associations, and in a style varying with his theme, but whose pure and classic flow was tinctured with just so much of poetic colouring as suited the purposes of romance. It was Shakspeare in prose.
The work was published, as we know, anonymously. Mr. Gillies states, however, that, while in the press, fragments of it were communicated to "Mr. Mackenzie, Dr. Brown, Mrs, Hamilton, and other savans or saventes, whose dicta on the merits of a new novel were considered unimpeachable." By their approbation "a strong body of friends was formed, and the curiosity of the public prepared the way for its reception." This may explain the rapidity with which the anonymous publication rose into a degree of favour, which, though not less surely, perhaps, it might have been more slow in achieving. The author jealously preserved his incognito, and, in order to heighten the mystification, flung off, almost simultaneously, a variety of works, in prose
