up a dramatic situation, but she invariably solves it, or rather fails to solve it, by an interruption at the critical moment, so that the reader’s interest is continually titillated.  Of a situation having in itself the germs of a solution, she apparently had not the remotest conception.  When a love scene has been carried far enough, the coming of a servant, the sound of a duel near by, or a seasonable outbreak of fire interrupts it.  Such devices were the common stock in trade of minor writers for the theatre.  Dramatic hacks who turned to prose fiction found it only a more commodious vehicle for incidents and scenes already familiar to them on the stage.  In their hands the novel became simply a looser and more extended series of sensational adventures.  Accident, though tempered in various degrees by jealousy, hatred, envy, or love, was the supreme motivating force.

The characters of Mrs. Haywood’s “Love in Excess” also inherited many traits from the debased but glittering Sir Fopling Flutters, Mirabells, Millamants, and Lady Wishforts of the Restoration stage.  Of character drawing, indeed, there is practically none in the entire piece; the personages are distinguished only by the degree of their willingness to yield to the tender passion.  The story in all its intricacies may best be described as the vie amoureuse of Count D’Elmont, a hero with none of the wit, but with all the gallantry of the rakes of late Restoration comedy.  Two parts of the novel relate the aristocratic intrigues of D’Elmont and his friends; the third shows him, like Mrs. Centlivre’s gallants in the fifth act, reformed and a model of constancy.  It would be useless to detail the sensational extravagances of the plot in all its ramifications, but the hero’s adventures before and after marriage may serve as a fair sample of the whole.

D’Elmont, returning to Paris from the French wars, becomes the admiration of both sexes, but especially in the eyes of the rich and noble Alovisa appears a conquest worthy of her powers.  To an incoherent expression of her passion sent to him in an anonymous letter he pays no attention, having for diversion commenced an intrigue with the lovely Amena.  Though Alovisa in a second billet bids him aim at a higher mark, “he had said too many fine things to be lost,” and continues his pursuit until Amena’s father takes alarm and locks her up.  Through her maid she arranges for a secret meeting, and though touched by her father’s reproofs, she is unable to withstand the pleas of the captivating count.  Their tete-a-tete in the Tuilleries, however, is interrupted by Alovisa’s spies, who alarm the house with cries of fire, so that the lovers find themselves locked out.  Half senseless with dismay, Amena finds shelter in the house of Alovisa, who, though inwardly triumphant, receives her rival civilly and promises to reconcile her to her father.  D’Elmont is so patently glad to be relieved of his fair charge that she demands back her letter,