After a slumber of forty years “The Agreeable Caledonian” was reprinted, as the “Monthly Review” informs us, from a copy corrected by Mrs. Haywood not long before her death.[16] The review continues, “It is like the rest of Mrs. Haywood’s novels, written in a tawdry style, now utterly exploded; the romances of these days being reduced much nearer the standard of nature, and to the manners of the living world.”  Realism is, indeed, far to seek in the brief but intricate tissue of incidents that made the novel of 1728.  To a taste accustomed to “Sir Charles Grandison,” and “Peregrine Pickle,” and “The Sentimental Journey” the rehash of Eliza Haywood’s novel must have seemed very far even from the manners of the world of fiction.  The judgment of the “Critical Review” was still more savage in its accuracy.[17] “This is a republication of a dull, profligate Haywoodian production, in which all the males are rogues, and all the females whores, without a glimpse of plot, fable, or sentiment.”  In its uncompromising literalness the critic’s verdict ranks with the learned Ascham’s opinion of the “Morte D’Arthur,”—­except that it has not been superseded.  The same animadversion might be urged against Defoe’s “Colonel Jacque” or “The Fortunate Mistress.”  If Mrs. Haywood sinned against the standards of the age to come, she was not out of touch with the spirit of her own generation.

As a writer she knew but one unfailing recipe for popularity:  whatever she touched must be forthwith gilded with passion.  The chief raison d’etre for “The Fair Hebrew:  or, a True, but Secret History of Two Jewish Ladies, Who lately resided in London” (1729) was to gratify the prejudices of anti-Semitic readers, yet it is hardly distinguishable from her sentimental love stories.

The young and gay Dorante, going to the synagogue for a lark, is tempted by the sight of a fair hand to break into the woman’s apartment and to expose himself to the charms of the beautiful Kesiah.  He engages her in a correspondence, but at their first interview she gives him clearly to understand that he can gain nothing from her but by marriage.  Driven by his unhappy passion, he complies with her demand, and she becomes a Church of England woman.  But once married, Kesiah is too proud to permit the concealment that prudence demands.  Though his father is sure to disinherit them, she insists upon revealing the marriage.

Dorante entrusts his small stock of money to his wife’s brother, Abimelech, in order to start him in trade.  The Jew goes to Holland with a woman whom he has saved from religious murder at the hands of a Levite, and nothing further is heard from him or the money.  Imprisoned by his creditors, Dorante is persuaded by his wife to sign away the entail of his estate in return for a sum of money.  Thereupon she departs with the gold and a new gallant, leaving her unhappy husband to be rescued from want by the kindness, of a younger brother.  After the poor solace of hearing that Kesiah and her paramour have been lost at sea, he dies of a broken heart.[18]