They were, beyond all question, immensely popular, and continued to be so for a long time: in fact it is almost sufficient evidence that there is, if I mistake not, in the British Museum no edition earlier than the tenth of the most famous of them, _The Children of the Abbey_ (1798).

This far-renowned work opens with the exclamation of the heroine Amanda, "Hail, sweet sojourn of my infancy!" and we are shortly afterwards informed that in the garden "the part appropriated to vegetables was divided from the part sacred to Flora." Otherwise, the substance of the thing is a curious sort of watered-down Richardson, passed through successive filtering beds of Mackenzie, and even of Mrs.
Radcliffe.

It is difficult for even the most critical taste to find much savour or stimulus in the resulting liquid.

But, like almost everybody mentioned here, Regina is a document of the demands of readers and the faculty of writers: and so she "standeth," if not exactly "crowned," yet ticketed.
Work--somewhat later--of some interest, but not of first-class quality, is to be found in the _Discipline_ (1811) and _Self-Control_ (1814) of Mary Brunton.

A Balfour of Orkney on the father's side and a Ligonier on the mother's, the authoress had access to the best English as well as Scottish society, and seems to have had more than a chance of taking a place in the former: but preferred to marry a minister-professor and settled down to country manse life.