The preface and the opening create expectations, not merely of amusement but of power, which are by no means fulfilled.

It is "S.G." who asserts that _Ida of Athens_ "has brought a blush to the cheek of many," and one can only repeat the suggested substitution.
The only faults that can be found with _The Heroine_ or _The Adventures of Cherubina_, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, which appeared in the same year, with no very different object and subject, though written in lighter vein, are one that it could not help and another that it could.
Unjustly, but unavoidably, the first is the worst.

That it is a burlesque rather overdone--a burlesque _burlesque_--not in the manner of Thackeray, but in that of some older and some more recent writers--is unfortunate, but not fatal.

One can forgive--one can even enjoy--the ghost who not only sneezes but says, "D--n, all is blown!" When the heroine is actually locked up with a man in a chest one is more doubtful: recovering when the Marquis de Furioso, "bowing gracefully to the bride," stabs himself to the heart, which is almost "the real Mackay" as they say in the North.

The slight awkwardness of snow falling the day after the characters have been eating strawberries does not amuse _us_ much, because this is a comparatively ordinary event of the early twentieth century, whatever it might be of the early nineteenth.
But what is fatal, though the author could not help it, is that the infinitely lighter, more artistic, and more lethal dart of _Northanger Abbey_ had been launched by the pen, if not the press, more than a dozen years before.
There are few more curious and interesting personages in the history of the English Novel than Maria Edgeworth.