Long after Mrs. Haywood’s death in 1756 came out the last novel presumably of her composing.  “The History of Leonora Meadowson,” published in two volumes in 1788, is but a recombination of materials already familiar to the reading public.  Leonora rashly yields to the wishes of her first lover, weds another, and makes yet a second experiment in matrimony before she finds her true mate in the faithful Fleetwood, whom she had thought inconstant.  Thus she is a near relation of the thoughtless Betsy, and possibly a descendant of the much married heroine of “Cleomelia.”  Another of Mrs. Haywood’s earlier fictions, “The Agreeable Caledonian,” had previously been used as the basis of a revision entitled “Clementina” (1768).  The reviewer of “Leonora” in the “Critical,” though aware of the novel’s shortcomings, still laments the passing of “the author of Betsy Thoughtless, our first guide in these delusive walks of fiction and fancy."[20]

“The spirit which dictated Betsy Thoughtless is evaporated; the fire of the author scarcely sparkles.  Even two meagre volumes could not be filled, without a little History of Melinda Fairfax;—­without the Tale of Cornaro and the Turk,—­a tale told twice, in verse and prose,—­a tale already often published, and as often read.  Alas, poor author! we catch with regret thy parting breath.”

FOOTNOTES [1] A rival translation called The Fortunate Countrymaid had already been published in 1740-1, and may be read in the seventh tome of The Novelist’s Magazine (Harrison).  Clara Reeve speaks of both translations as “well known to the readers of Circulating Libraries.” Progress of Romance (1785), I, 130.

[2] Austin Dobson, Eighteenth Century Vignettes, First Series, 44.  “Captain Coram’s Charity.”

[3] In one other respect Natura belongs to the new rather than to the old school:  he takes genuine delight in the wilder beauties of the landscape.  “Whether you climb the craggy mountains or traverse the flowery vale; whether thick woods set limits to the sight, or the wide common yields unbounded prospect; whether the ocean rolls in solemn state before you, or gentle streams run purling by your side, nature in all her different shapes delights....  The stupendous mountains of the Alps, after the plains and soft embowered recesses of Avignon, gave perhaps a no less grateful sensation to the mind of Natura.”  Such extraordinary appreciation in an age that regarded mountains as frightful excrescences upon the face of nature, makes the connoisseur of the passions a pioneer of the coming age rather than a survival of the last.

[4] J. Ireland and J. Nichols, Hogarth’s Works, Second Series, 31, note.  “Mrs. Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless was in MS entitled Betsy Careless; but, from the infamy at that time annexed to the name, had a new baptism.”  The “inimitable Betsy Careless” is sufficiently immortalized in Fielding’s Amelia, in Mrs. Charke’s Life, and in Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode, Plate III.