Dalinda’s unhappy passion for Malvolio incites him to ruin her, and though he deludes her with an unregistered marriage at the Fleet, he has no scruples against marrying the rich Flavilla.  Wishing to possess both Flavilla’s fortune and Dalinda’s charms, he effects a reconciliation with the latter by promising to own their prior contract, but when he comes out into the open and proposes to entertain her as a mistress, she indignantly returns to her grandmother’s house, where she summons her brother and her faithful lover, Leander, to force her perfidious husband to do her justice.  The latter half of the novel is a tissue of intrigue upon intrigue, with a complication of lawsuits and letters in which Malvolio’s villainy is fully exposed, and he is forced to separate from Flavilla, but is unable to exert his claims upon Dalinda.  She in turn cannot wring from him any compensation, nor can she in conscience recompense the faithful love of Leander while her husband is living.  Thus all parties are sufficiently unhappy to make their ways a warning to the youth of both sexes.

Evidently the history, though indeed founded on fact, differs from the works of Mrs. Haywood’s imagination only in the tedious length of the legal proceedings and the uncertainty of the outcome.  The only reason for basing the story on the villainy of Mr. Cresswell was to take advantage of the momentary excitement over the scandal.  A similar appeal to the passion for diving into the intrigues of the great is apparent in the title of a novel of 1744, “The Fortunate Foundlings:  Being the Genuine History of Colonel M——­rs, and his Sister, Madame du P——­y, the issue of the Hon. Ch——­es M——­rs.  Son of the late Duke of R——­ L——­D.  Containing many wonderful Accidents that befel them in their Travels, and interspersed with the Characters and Adventures of Several Persons of Condition, in the most polite Courts of Europe.”  The Preface after the usual assurances that the work is compiled from original documents and is therefore more veracious than “the many Fictions which have been lately imposed upon the World, under the specious Titles of Secret Histories, Memoirs, &c,” informs us that the purpose of the publication is to encourage virtue in both sexes by showing the amiableness of it in real characters.  Instead of exposing vice in the actions of particular persons, the book is a highly moral laudation of those scions of the house of Manners whose names are adumbrated in the title.  It cannot, therefore, be classed as a scandal novel or secret history.

The latter term, though loosely applied to the short tale of passion for the purpose of stimulating public curiosity, meant strictly only that type of pseudo-historical romance which interpreted actual history in the light of court intrigue.  In France a flood of histories, annals, anecdotes, and memoirs,—­secret, gallant, and above all true,—­had been pouring from the press since 1665.  The writers of these