Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with the advent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself.

For these things are, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel.

Not so very much earlier Mr.Nisby would have had a chance of delivering his opinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would have had prison bread and water for marrow-bones and "Brooks and Hellier." These would have been subjects for romance: the others were subjects for novel.
[13] Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a good deal of plagiarism in _Evelina_ from _Miss Betsy Thoughtless_: but it is exactly in this _life_-quality that the earlier novelist fails.
All glory, therefore, be to Frances Burney; both that which her generous successor and superior gives her in _Northanger Abbey_, and more also--for Miss Austen, naturally enough, was not taking the view-point of literary history.

But it has been said that Fanny herself possessed her gift in two senses uncertainly--first, in that she did not very clearly perceive what it was, and, secondly, in that she soon lost grip of it.

It is, therefore, not wonderful that few others caught the trick from her for a long time--for indeed fully twenty years, till Miss Edgeworth made her appearance.