LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

OLD ENGLISH BARON—

PORTRAIT OF CLARA REEVE

Frontispiece

EDMUND'S DREAM IN THE HAUNTED CHAMBER, To face page 66

"HE OUTRODE HIS SERVANTS, AND WAS alone.

"WE MUST GO DOWN HERE," SAID ISABELLA.

One thousand copies of this Edition have been printed and

the type distributed. No more will be published.

MEMOIR.

CLARA REEVE, the ingenious authoress of The Old English Baron, was the daughter of the Reverend William Reeve, M.A., Rector of Freston, and of Kerton, in Suffolk, and perpetual Curate of Saint Nicholas. Her grandfather was the Reverend Thomas Reeve, Rector of Storeham Aspal, and afterwards of St. Mary Stoke, in Ipswich, where the family had been long resident, and enjoyed the rights of free burghers. Miss Reeve's mother's maiden name was Smithies, daughter of Smithies, goldsmith and jeweller to King George I.

In a letter to a friend, Mrs. Reeve thus speaks of her father :-"My father was an old Whig; from him I have learned all that I know; he was my oracle; he used to make me read the Parliamentary debates while he smoked his pipe after supper. I gaped and yawned over them at the time, but unawares to myself, they fixed my principles once and

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for ever. He made me read Rapin's History of England; the information it gave made amends for its dryness. I read Cato's Letters, by Trenchard and Gordon; I read the Greek and Roman Histories, and Plutarch's Lives ;-all these at an age when few people of either sex can read their names."

The Reverend Mr. Reeves, himself one of a family of eight children, had the same number; and it is therefore likely, that it was rather Clara's strong natural turn for study, than any degree of exclusive care which his partiality bestowed, that enabled her to acquire such a stock of early information. After his death, his widow resided in Colchester with three of their daughters; and it was here that Miss Clara Reeve first became an authoress, by translating from Latin Barclay's fine old romance, entitled Argenis, published in 1762, under the title of The Phonix. It was in 1777, five years afterwards, that she produced her first and most distinguished work. It was published by Mr. Dilly of the Poultry (who gave ten pounds for the copyright) under the title of The Champion of Virtue, a Gothic Story. The work came to a second edition in the succeeding year, and was then first called The Old English Baron. The cause of the change we do not pretend to guess; for if Fitz-Owen be considered as the Old English Baron, we do not see wherefore a character, passive in him

self from beginning to end, and only acted upon by others, should be selected to give a name to the story. We ought not to omit to mention that this work is inscribed to Mrs. Brigden, the daughter of Richardson, who is stated to have lent her assistance to the revisal and correction of the work.

The success of The Old English Baron encouraged Miss Reeve to devote more of her leisure hours to literary composition, and she published in succession the following works:-The Two Mentors, a Modern Story; The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners; The Exile; or, Memoirs of Count de Cronstadt, the principal incidents of which are borrowed from a novel by M. D'Arnaud; The School for Widows, a Novel; Plans of Education, with Remarks on the System of other Writers, in a duodecimo volume; and The Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon, a natural Son of Edward the Black Prince; with Anecdotes of many other eminent Persons of the fourteenth Century.

To these works we have to add another tale, of which the interest turned upon supernatural appearances. Miss Reeve informs the public, in a preface to a late edition of The Old English Baron, that in compliance with the suggestion of a friend, she had composed Castle Connor, an Irish Story, in which apparitions were introduced. The manuscript, being