But her situations--such as the meeting in _A Simple Story_ of a father with the daughter whom, though not exactly casting her off, he has persistently refused to see, in revenge for her mother's unfaithfulness, and the still more famous scene in _Nature and Art_ where a judge passes the death-sentence on a woman whom he has betrayed--have, as has been allowed, the dramatic or melodramatic quality which attracts people in "decadent" periods.

There seems, indeed, to have been a certain decadent charm about Mrs.Inchbald herself--with her beauty, her stage skill, her strict virtue combined with any amount of "sensibility," her affectation of nature, and her benevolence not in the least sham but distinctly posing.

And something of this rococo relish may no doubt, with a little good will and sympathy, be detected in her books.

But of the genuine life and the natural language which occasionally inspirit the much more unequal and more generally commonplace work of Miss Burney, she has practically nothing.

And she thus falls out of the main line of development, merely exemplifying the revolutionary and sentimental episode.
We must now, for some pages, illustrate the course of the novel by minor examples: and we may begin with a brief notice of two writers, one of whom might have been taken before Miss Burney and the other just after her chronologically: but who, in the order of thought and method, will come better here.