rather heavily toward sober piety.  A mother recommends poetry and history for the reading of her twelve year old daughter, though allowing an occasional indulgence in “well wrote Novels.”  Eusebia discusses the power of divine music with the Bishop of ***.  Berinthia writes to Berenice to urge her to make the necessary preparations for futurity.  Philenia assures the Reverend Doctor *** that she is a true penitent, and beseeches his assistance to strengthen her pious resolutions.  Hillaria laments to Clio that she is unable to think seriously on death, and Aristander edifies Melissa by proving from the principles of reason and philosophy the certainty of a future existence, and the absurdity and meanness of those people’s notions, who degrade the dignity of their species, and put human nature on a level with that of the brute creation.  In all this devotion there was no doubt something of Mrs. Howe.  “Epistles for the Ladies” was not the first “attempt to employ the ornaments of romance in the decoration of religion"[6] nor the best, but along with the pious substance the author sometimes adopts an almost Johnsonian weightiness of style, as when Ciamara gives to Sophronia an account of the finishing of a fine building she had been at an infinite expense in erecting, with some moral reflections on the vanity and disappointment of all sub-lunary expectations.

In her essays, even the most serious, Mrs. Haywood was a follower of Addison rather than Johnson.  The first of them, if we disregard the slight discourse appended to the “Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier,” was “The Tea-Table:  or, A Conversation between some Polite Persons of both Sexes, at a Lady’s Visiting Day.  Wherein are represented the Various Foibles, and Affectations, which form the Character of an Accomplish’d Beau, or Modern Fine Lady.  Interspersed with several Entertaining and Instructive Stories,"[7] (1725), which most resembles a “day” detached from the interminable “La Belle Assemblee” of Mme de Gomez, translated by Mrs. Haywood a few months before.  There is the same polite conversation, the debate between love and reason, the poem,[8] and the story.  But the moral reflections upon tea-tables, the description of Amiana’s, where only wit and good humor prevail, and the satirical portraits of a titled coxcomb and a bevy of fine ladies, are all in the manner of the “Tatler.”  The manuscript novel read by one of the company savors of nothing but Mrs. Haywood, who was evidently unable to slight her favorite theme of passion.  Her comment on contemporary manners soon gives place to “Beraldus and Celemena:  or the Punishment of Mutability,” a tale of court intrigue in her warmest vein.  The authors of the “Tatler” and “Spectator” had, of course, set a precedent for the inclusion of short romantic stories in the essay of manners, and even the essays with no distinct element of fiction were preparing for the novelist the powerful tool of characterization.  Writers of fiction were