Even unmarried ladies, Miramillia finds, are not without their discontents.  Amalia is vexed over the failure of a ball gown.  Clorilla is outranked by an acquaintance whose father has obtained preferment.  Claribella pouts because a man has shot himself for love of her rival.  Selinda mourns her lap-dog dead.

Just as Miramillia is ready to give over her search for a happy woman, Adario, her son, returns in company with a former lover of hers whose daughter he has saved from a villain at the expense of a wound from which he has but then recovered.  Naturally the girl rewards him with her hand, and all ends well.[7]

Of the stories in this diversified collection that of Anziana approaches in kind, though not in degree, the tragic pathos of Isabella and the Pot of Basil ("Decameron,” IV, 5).  The second narrative has all the glamor of adventure in the barbaric East, and the romantic interest that attaches to lovers separated but eternally constant.  The histories of Stenoclea and of Tellisinda contain situations of dramatic intensity.  But perhaps the story of Violathia is the most worthy of attention on account both of its defects and of its merits.  The weakest part of the plot is the husband, who is jealous without cause, and equally without reason suddenly reforms.  But the character of Violathia is admirably drawn.  Unlike the usual heroine of Haywoodian fiction she is superior to circumstance and does not yield her love to the most complacent adjacent male.  As a dutiful wife she resists for a long time the insinuations of Charmillo, but when she decides to fly to her lover, her husband’s tardy change of heart cannot alter her feelings.  Her character is individual, firm, and palpable.  If the story was original with Mrs. Haywood, it shows that her powers of characterization were not slight when she wished to exert them.  The influence of the novella and of the Oriental tale produced nothing better.

From other literary forms the makers of fiction freely derived sensational materials and technical hints.  Without insisting too closely upon the connection between novel and play, we may well remember that nearly all the early novelists, Defoe excepted, were intimately associated with the theatre.  Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Haywood, and later Fielding and Mrs. Lennox were successful in both fields.  The women writers especially were familiar with dramatic technique both as actors and playwrights, and turned their stage training to account when they wrote prose fiction.  Mrs. Haywood’s first novel, “Love in Excess” (1720), showed evidences of her apprenticeship to the theatre.  Its three parts may be compared to the three acts of a play; the principal climax falls properly at the end of the second part, and the whole ends in stereotyped theatrical fashion with the marriage of all the surviving couples.  The handling of incident, too, is in the fashion of the stage.  Mrs. Haywood had sufficient skill to build