She possessed an inexhaustible command of dialogue which was always natural and sometimes very far from trivial; and if she had no command of the greater novelists' imagination in the creation of character and story, she had an almost uncanny supply of invention, of what may be called the second or third class, in these respects.

She wrote too much and too long; but it cannot be said that she ever merely repeated herself.

And her best books--the famous _Heir of Redclyffe_ (1853), which captivated William Morris and his friends at Oxford, and which, with a little unnecessary sentimentality and a little "unco-guidness," is full of cleverness, nature, good sense, good taste, and good form; _Heartsease_ (1854), perhaps the best of all; _Dynevor Terrace_ (1857), less of a general favourite but full of good things; and the especially popular _Daisy Chain_ (1856), with not a few others--are things which no courageous and catholic critic of fiction will ever be tired of defending or (which is not always the same thing) of reading.

Some of her early tales, before these, were a little "raw": and most of her later work showed (as did Anthony Trollope's and that of other though not all very prolific novelists) that the field had been overcropped.

But she was hardly ever dull: and she always had that quality--if not of the supreme artist, of the real craftsman--which prevents a thing from being a failure.