offered the vacant post to Miss Burney. When we consider that
Miss Burney was decidedly the most popular writer of fictitious
narrative then living, that competence, if not opulence, was
within her reach, and that she was more than usually happy in her
domestic circle, and when we compare the sacrifice which she was
invited to make with the remuneration which was held out to her,
we are divided between laughter and indignation.

What was demanded of her was that she should consent to be almost
as completely separated from her family and friends as if she had
gone to Calcutta, and almost as close a prisoner as if she had
been sent to gaol for a libel; that with talents which had
instructed and delighted the highest living minds, she should now
be employed only in mixing snuff and sticking pins; that she
should be summoned by a waiting-woman's bell to a waiting-woman's
duties; that she should pass her whole life under the restraints
of a paltry etiquette, should sometimes fast till she was ready
to swoon with hunger, should sometimes stand till her knees have
way with fatigue; that she should not dare to speak or move
without considering how her mistress might like her words and
gestures. Instead of those distinguished men and women, the
flower of all political parties, with whom she had been in the
habit of mixing on terms of equal friendship, she was to have for
her perpetual companion the chief keeper of the robes, an old hag
from Germany, of mean understanding, of insolent manners, and of
temper which, naturally savage, had now been exasperated by
disease. Now and then, indeed, poor Frances might console her-
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self for the loss of Burke's and Windham's society by joining in