Above all, the book (let it be remembered that it came before _Tristram Shandy_) is almost the beginning of the Eccentric Novel--not of the satiric-marvellous type which Cyrano and Swift had revived from Lucian, but of a new, a modern, and a very English variety.
Buncle is sometimes extraordinarily like Borrow (on whom he probably had influence), and it would not be hard to arrange a very considerable spiritual succession for him, by no means deserving the uncomplimentary terms in which he dismisses his progeny in the flesh.
If there is an almost preposterous cheerfulness about _Buncle_, the necessary alternative can be amply supplied by the next book to which we come.

The curious way in which Johnson almost invariably managed to hit the critical nail on the head is well illustrated by his remark to Frances Sheridan, author of the _Memoirs of Miss Sydney Bid[d]ulph_ (1761), that he "did not know whether she had a right, on moral principles, to make her readers suffer so much." Substitute "aesthetic" for "moral" and "heroine" for "readers," and the remark retains its truth on another scheme of criticism, which Johnson was not ostensibly employing, and which he might have violently denounced.

The book, though with its subsequent prolongation too long, is a powerful one: and though actually dedicated to Richardson and no doubt consciously owing much to his influence, practically clears off the debt by its own earnings.

But Miss Bidulph (she started with only one _d_, but acquired another), whose journal to her beloved Cecilia supplies the matter and method of the novel, is too persistently unlucky and ill-treated, without the smallest fault of her own, for anything but really, not fictitiously, real life.

Her misfortunes spring from obeying her mother (but there was neither moral nor satire in this then), and husbands, lovers, rivals, relations, connections--everybody--conspire to afflict her.