[In the following excerpt, the critic describes the favorable impression made by Opie's The Father and Daughter in regard to its ability to describe pathos and distress and to elicit the appropriate feelings in the reader.]

The pleasures of melancholy are suited only to minds of uncommon susceptibility,—to those persons who may be said to have a sympathetic taste for distress; and from readers of this class, the tale of woe now before us will meet with peculiar acceptance. For ourselves, we own that we have been truly affected by the perusal of it, since it is replete with interest, and possesses pathos enough to affect the heart of the most callous of critical readers. Our only consolation, under the first impression on our feelings, arose from the hope and persuasion that the story is not founded on Fact, though the tragic part and the catastrophe may be too often exemplified in the consequences attending the profligacy of our young men of fortune and fashion.

Mrs. Opie speaks thus modestly of her production:

It is not without considerable apprehension that I offer myself as an avowed Author at the bar of public opinion,—and that apprehension is heightened by its being the general custom to give indiscriminately the name of NOVEL to every thing in Prose that comes in the shape of a Story, however simple it be in its construction, and humble in its pretensions.

By this means, the following Publication is in danger of being tried by a standard according to which it was never intended to be made, and to be criticised for wanting those merits which it was never meant to possess.

I therefore beg leave to say, in justice to myself, that I know The Father and Daughter is wholly devoid of those attempts at strong character, comic situation, bustle, and variety of incident, which constitute a NOVEL, and that its highest pretensions are, to be a SIMPLE, MORAL TALE.

As this narrative is not well adapted for either abridgment or detail, we shall only add our brief commendation of its moral tendency, and proceed to take some notice of the poetical pieces which the ingenious authoress has added to the prose part of this publication. The first and most considerable of these small but pleasing productions is "An Epistle supposed to be addressed by Eudora, the Maid of Corinth, to her Lover, Philemon, informing him of her having traced his shadow on the wall, while he was sleeping, the night before his departure to a foreign country; together with the joyful consequences of this action." The ARGUMENT is thus given:

Dibutades, a Potter, of Sicyon, first formed likenesses in clay [The Wedgwood of his time], at Corinth, but was indebted to his daughter for the invention. The girl being in love with a young man who was soon going from her into some remote country, traced out the lines of his face from his shadow on the wall by candle-light. Her father, filling up the lines with his clay, formed a bust, and hardened it in the fire with the rest of his earthen ware.

This accidental discovery, according to the Epistle, brought Dibutades into great fame and fortune. . . .