most triumphant of these passages is the scene on the staircase of Elmwood House—a passage which would be spoilt by quotation and which no one who has ever read it could forget. But the same quality is to be found throughout her work. “Oh, Miss Woodley!” exclaims Miss Milner, forced at last to confess to her friend what she feels towards Dorriforth, “I love him with all the passion of a mistress, and with all the tenderness of a wife.” No young lady, even in the eighteenth century, ever gave utterance to such a sentence as that. It is the sentence, not of a speaker, but of a writer; and yet, for that very reason, it is delightful, and comes to us charged with a curious sense of emotion, which is none the less real for its elaboration. In Nature and Art, Mrs. Inchbald’s second novel, the climax of the story is told in a series of short paragraphs, which, for bitterness and concentration of style, are almost reminiscent of Stendhal:

The jury consulted for a few minutes. The verdict was “Guilty”.

She heard it with composure.

But when William placed the fatal velvet on his head and rose to pronounce sentence, she started with a kind of convulsive motion, retreated a step or two back, and, lifting up her hands with a scream, exclaimed—

“Oh, not from you!”

The piercing shriek which accompanied these words prevented their being heard by part of the audience; and those who heard them thought little of their meaning, more than that they expressed her fear of dying.

Serene and dignified, as if no such exclamation had been uttered, William delivered the fatal speech, ending with “Dead, dead, dead”.

She fainted as he closed the period, and was carried back to prison in a swoon; while he adjourned the court to go to dinner.

Here, no doubt, there is a touch of melodrama; but it is the melodrama of a rhetorician, and, in that fine “She heard it with composure”, genius has brushed aside the forced and the obvious, to express, with supreme directness, the anguish of a soul.

For, in spite of Mrs. Inchbald’s artificialities, in spite of her lack of that kind of realistic description which seems to modern readers the very blood and breath of a good story, she has the power of doing what, after all, only a very few indeed of her fellow craftsmen have ever been able to do—she can bring into her pages the living pressure of a human passion, she can invest, if not with realism, with 

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