noble; and while it engages the Admiration and Applause of the worthy and judicious Few, will certainly draw on you the Ridicule and Hatred of that unnumber’d Crowd, who justly dread the Lash of a Satire, which their own dissolute Behaviour has given sting to.  But I, who am perfectly acquainted with the Sweetness of your Disposition, and that Tenderness with which you consider the Errors of your Fellow Creatures, need not be inform’d, that while you expose the Foulness of those Facts, which renders them deservedly Objects of Reproach, you will [not] forget to pity the Weakness of Humanity and Lethargy of Reason, which at some unguarded Hours, steals on the Souls of even the wisest Men; and tho’ I shou’d find, in the Course of your Papers, all the little Inadvertencies of my own Life recorded, I am sensible it will be done in such a Manner as I cannot but approve.”

No particular intimacy between the author and the bookseller can be inferred from this extravagant but conventional flattery.  The interpretation of what Mrs. Haywood terms inadvertencies—­a word almost invariably used in her writings as a euphemism—­is a more difficult problem, for definite evidence of the authoress’ gallantries is entirely lacking.  But however damaging to herself her frankness may have been, there was little in the production to arouse the ire of Pope.  The only instance in which the maligned novelist may have intended to show her resentment was in the Preface to her tragedy “Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh” (1729) where with veiled sarcasm she confessed herself “below the Censure of the Gyant-Criticks of this Age.”

Although Mrs. Haywood was evidently not responsible for the inclusion of her tale in “The Female Dunciad,” and although the piece itself was entirely innocuous, her daring to raise her head even by accident brought down upon her another scurrilous rebuke, not this time from the poet himself, but from her former admirer, Richard Savage.  In “An Author to be Let” (1732) Pope’s jackal directed against the members of a supposed club of dunces, presided over by James Moore-Smith and including Theobald, Welsted, Curll, Dennis, Cooke, and Bezaleel Morris, a tirade of abuse, in which “the divine Eliza” came in for her full share of vituperation.

“When Mrs. Haywood ceas’d to be a Strolling Actress, why might not the Lady (tho’ once a Theatrical Queen) have subsisted by turning Washer-woman?  Has not the Fall of Greatness been a frequent Distress in all Ages?  She might have caught a beautiful Bubble as it arose from the Suds of her Tub, blown it in Air, seen it glitter, and then break!  Even in this low Condition, she had play’d with a Bubble, and what more, is the Vanity of human Greatness?  She might also have consider’d the sullied Linnen growing white in her pretty red Hands, as an Emblem of her Soul, were it well scoured by Repentance for the Sins of her Youth:  But she rather chooses starving by writing Novels of Intrigue, to teach