But that the author of “Robinson Crusoe” would have told the “little History” of the young woman without a fortune who obtains the husband she desires by means of a magic cake (p. 86) is scarcely probable, for the story is a sentimental tale that would have appealed to love-sick Lydia Languishes.  As far as we know, Defoe remained hard-headed to the last.  But Mrs. Haywood when she was not a scandal-monger, was a sentimentalist.  The story would have suited her temperament and the tastes of her readers.  It is told so much in her manner that one could swear that the originator of the anecdote was aut Eliza, aut diabola.  A few pages further on (p. 104) appears the incident of a swaggerer who enters the royal vault of Westminster Abbey at dead of night on a wager, and having the tail of his coat twitched by the knife he has stuck in the ground, is frightened into a faint—­a story which Mrs. Haywood later retold in different words in her “Female Spectator."[11] The “Secret Memoirs” further informs us by a casual remark of Mr. Campbell’s that Eliza Haywood was well acquainted with the seer.

“Sometimes, when surrounded by my Friends, such as Anthony Hammond, Esq; Mr. Philip Horneck, Mr. Philips, Mr.——­, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Fowk, Mrs. Eliza Haywood, and other celebrated Wits, of which my House, for some Years has been the general Rendezvous, a good Bowl of Punch before me, and the Glass going round in a constant Circle of Mirth and Good Humour, I have, in a Moment, beheld Sights which has froze my very Blood, and put me into Agonies that disordered the whole Company” (p. 131).

The last anecdote in the first section is a repetition at some length of the story of Campbell’s adventures in Holland, not as related in Defoe’s “Life and Adventures,” but according to the version in Mrs Haywood’s “Dumb Projector.”  The beginning, which has to do with a grave old gentleman who was bit by a viper, is told in almost the same words; indeed some letters that passed between the characters are identically the same, and the end, though much abbreviated, contains a number of sentences taken word for word from the earlier telling of the story.  Finally, Mrs. Haywood was the first and hitherto the only writer of the Campbell pamphlets who had printed letters supposedly addressed to the prophet by his clients.  The device was peculiarly hers.  The “Original Letters sent to Mr. Campbel by his Consulters” in the “Secret Memoirs” are similar to those already composed by her for “A Spy upon the Conjurer.”  There is no reason to think that she did not invent the later epistles as well as the former.