[32] Monthly Review, II, 167, Jan. 1750.

[33] The Biographia Dramatica gives this date.  Clara Reeve, Progress of Romance, I, 121, however, gives 1758, while Mrs. Griffith, Collection of Novels (1777), II, 159, prefers 1759.  The two novels were Clementina (1768), a revision of The Agreeable Caledonian, and The History of Leonora Meadowson (1788).

CHAPTER II

SHORT ROMANCES OF PASSION

The little amatory tales which formed Mrs. Haywood’s chief stock in trade when she first set up for a writer of fiction, inherited many of the characteristics of the long-winded French romances.  Though some were told with as much directness as any of the intercalated narratives in “Clelie” or “Cleopatre,” others permitted the inclusion of numerous “little histories” only loosely connected with the main plot.  Letters burning with love or jealousy were inserted upon the slightest provocation, and indeed remained an important component of Eliza Haywood’s writing, whether the ostensible form was romance, essay, or novel.  Scraps of poetry, too, were sometimes used to ornament her earliest effusions, but the other miscellaneous features of the romances—­lists of maxims, oratory, moral discourses, and conversations —­were discarded from the first.  The language of these short romances, while generally more easy and often more colloquial than the absurd extravagances of the translators of heroic romances and their imitators, still smacked too frequently of shady groves and purling streams to be natural.  Many conventional themes of love or jealousy, together with such stock types as the amorous Oriental potentate, the lover disguised as a slave, the female page, the heroine of excessive delicacy, the languishing beauty, the ravishing sea-captain, and the convenient pirate persisted in the pages of Mrs. Barker, Mrs. Haywood, and Mrs. Aubin.  As in the interminable tomes of Scudery, love and honor supplied the place of life and manners in the tales of her female successors, and though in some respects their stories were nearer the standard of real conduct, new novel on the whole was but old romance writ small.

In attempting to revitalize the materials and methods of the romances Mrs. Haywood was but following the lead of the French romancieres, who had successfully invaded the field of prose fiction when the passing of the precieuse fashion and Boileau’s influential ridicule[1] had discredited the romance in the eyes of writers with classical predilections.  Mme de La Fayette far outshines her rivals, but a host of obscure women, headed by Hortense Desjardins, better known as Mme de Villedieu, hastened to supply the popular demand for romantic stories.  In drawing their subjects from the histories of more modern courts than those of Rome, Greece, or Egypt they endeavored to make their “historical” romances of