D'Arblay, MADAME, better known as a novelist by her maiden name of Frances Burney, was born at King's Lynn, 13th June 1752, the second daughter and the third child of the six children of Dr Burney, then organist there. Her father removed to London to teach music in 1760, and on his wife's death next year sent his daughters Esther and Susannah to a school in Paris, but kept Fanny at home from a fear that her great affection for her maternal grandmother, then in France, should make her a convert to Catholicism. Dr Burney's second marriage in 1766 gave her a kind step-mother, but did not disturb her daydreams nor her incessant scribbling of stories, plays, and poems, begun at ten, although but two years before she was ignorant of her letters. On her fifteenth birthday, in a fit of repentance for such waste of time, she burned all her papers, but she could not erase from her brain the plot of the story which grew later into Evelina, or a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. This was sold for £20 to Lowmes, and published anonymously in January 1778, not even her father having seen the manuscript, although he had been dutifully told beforehand of the project. Dr Burney at once recognised his daughter's touch, and soon confided the secret to Mrs Thrale, who, as well as Dr Johnson, petted and flattered the gifted young authoress to her heart's delight. The praises showered upon the book by Johnson, Reynolds, Burke, and the whole world of fashion, might well have turned her head, and are told in delightful detail in her diary. Urged to write a comedy, she had the sense to suppress it in deference to the criticisms of her father and Samuel Crisp, a sagacious old critic, soured to the world but not to her, the 'daddy' of so many of her letters. In 1782 she published Cecilia, which was no less successful than her first novel. At Windsor, in the house of her friend the venerable Mrs Delany, she became known to the royal family, and soon received (July 1786) the appointment of second keeper of the robes at court, with a salary of £200 a year. She soon found her menial duties intolerably tedious, and her health began to decline, but her veneration for the queen kept her from resigning until compelled by the remonstrances of Burke, Boswell, Windham, and others of her father's friends. At length in July 1791 she was permitted to retire with a pension of £100 a year, and soon recovered her health and spirits by travelling in England. At Mickleham, near Dorking, she met General D'Arblay, a French refugee, and married him on nothing more than her pension in July 1793. Her third novel, Camilla, was published by subscription in 1796, and brought her, it is supposed, about 3000 guineas, with which she built Camilla Cottage, near Mickleham. It was, however, nothing more than a pecuniary success, while her tragedy, Edwy and Elvina, had already been damned in 1795, spite of the acting of Mrs Siddons and Kemble. From 1802 to 1812 she lived at Passy in France with her husband, who had procured civil employment there, then returned to England with her son, tended her father till his death in April 1814, and in the beginning of the same year published her last novel, The Wanderer, another literary failure. At the first Restoration she joined her husband in Paris, was at Brussels during the battle of Waterloo, and soon after returned finally to England with her husband, who died 3d May 1818. Her son was tenth wrangler at Cambridge that year, took orders, became minister at Ely chapel in 1836, and died of decline in 1837. In 1832 Madame d'Arblay published her memoirs of her father, written in a pretentious style, and died 6th Jan. 1840. Five volumes of her Letters and Diaries were published in 1842, two more volumes in 1846, and the Early Diary in 1890. Spite of its tedious triviality this work is invaluable from the insight it gives us into the very heart of the dull decorous court of George III., and much more from its revelation of English manners towards the end of the eighteenth century. Its stories of Dr Johnson and his group will live in literary history. Croker's ill-tempered attacks on her veracity for allowing an impression to go abroad that Evelina had been written at seventeen, printed in the Quarterly Review for April 1833 and June 1842, were satisfactorily answered by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review for January 1843. As a novelist, Frances Burney's greatest merit is that she conceived the idea of representing modern society in a manner realistic without ceasing to be feminine and completely artistic. She was the forerunner of Miss Edgeworth and Jane Austen, who were both greater than herself. The latter's admiration for her model is imperishably written in a passage in Northanger Abbey.