Eye,
  And, as our captive Spirits ebb and flow,
  Smile at the Tempests you have rais’d below: 
  The Face of Guilt a Flush of Vertue wears,
  And sudden burst the involuntary Tears: 
  Honour’s sworn Foe, the Libertine with Shame,
  Descends to curse the sordid lawless Flame;
  The tender Maid here learns Man’s various Wiles,
  Rash Youth, hence dread the Wanton’s venal Smiles—­
  Sure ’twas by brutal Force of envious Man,
  First Learning’s base Monopoly began;
  He knew your Genius, and refus’d his Books,
  Nor thought your Wit less fatal than your Looks. 
  Read, proud Usurper, read with conscious Shame,
  Pathetic Behn, or Mauley’s greater Name;
  Forget their Sex, and own when Haywood writ,
  She clos’d the fair Triumvirate of Wit;
  Born to delight as to reform the Age,
  She paints Example thro’ the shining Page;
  Satiric Precept warms the moral Tale,
  And Causticks burn where the mild Balsam fails; [sic]
  A Task reserv’d for her, to whom ’tis given,
  To stand the Proxy of vindictive Heav’n!”

Amid the conventional extravagance of this panegyric exist some useful grains of criticism.  One of the most clearly expressed and continually reiterated aims of prose fiction, as of other species of writing from time immemorial, was that of conveying to the reader a moral through the agreeable channel of example.  This exemplary purpose, inherited by eighteenth century novelists from Cervantes and from the French romances, was asserted again and again in Mrs. Haywood’s prefaces,[23] while the last paragraphs of nearly all her tales were used to convey an admonition or to proclaim the value of the story as a “warning to the youth of both sexes.”  To modern readers these pieces seem less successful illustrations of fiction made didactic, than of didacticism dissolved and quite forgot in fiction, but Sterling and other eulogists strenuously supported the novelist’s claim to moral usefulness.[24] The pill of improvement supposed to be swallowed along with the sweets of diversion hardly ever consisted of good precepts and praiseworthy actions, but usually of a warning or a horrible example of what to avoid.[25] As a necessary corollary, the more striking and sensational the picture of guilt, the more efficacious it was likely to prove in the cause of virtue.  So in the Preface to “Lasselia” (1723), published to “remind the unthinking Part of the World, how dangerous it is to give way to Passion,” the writer hopes that her unexceptionable intent “will excuse the too great Warmth, which may perhaps appear in some particular Pages; for without the Expression being invigorated in some measure proportionate to the Subject, ’twou’d be impossible for a Reader to be sensible how far it touches him, or how probable it is that he is falling into those Inadvertencies which the Examples I relate wou’d caution him to avoid.”  As a woman, too, Mrs. Haywood was excluded from “Learning’s