character of these assistants may well make us doubt their actuality; and from the style of the lucubrations, at least, no evidence of a plurality of authors can readily be perceived.  Indeed after the first few numbers we hear nothing more of them.  “Mira” was the pseudonym used by Mrs. Haywood in “The Wife” (1756), while a periodical called “The Young Lady” began to appear just before her death under the pen-name of Euphrosine.

Whether written by a Female Spectator Club or by a single authoress, the essays in purpose, method, and style are evidently imitated from their famous model.  The loose plan and general intention to rectify the manners of the age allowed the greatest latitude in the choice of subject matter.  In a single paper are jumbled together topics so diverse as the degradation of the stage, the immoderate use of tea, and the proper choice of lovers.  The duty of periodical essayists to castigate the follies of the time is graphically represented in the frontispiece to the second volume, where Apollo, seated on some substantial clouds and holding in his hand “The Female Spectator,” despatches a flying Mercury, who in spite of the efforts of two beaux with drawn swords and a belle in deshabille, chastises a female figure of Luxuria lolling in a chariot pulled by one inadequate grasshopper.  In the essays themselves the same purpose led to the censure of gambling, lying, affectation of youth by the aged, jilts, “Anti-Eternitarians,” scandal bearing, and other petty sins and sinners.  For political readers a gentleman contributes a conversation between a Hanoverian and an English lady, in which the latter has the best of the argument.  An account of Topsy-Turvy Land satirizes illogical practices in a manner familiar to the readers of “The Bab Ballads.”  The few literary papers are concerned with true and false taste, the delights of reading, Mr. Akenside’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” and the horrors of the same, the outwearing of romance, and love-letters passed between Augustus Caesar and Livia Drusilla, which last Mrs. Haywood was qualified to judge as an expert.  Essays on religion and the future life reveal something of the sober touch and moral earnestness of Johnson, but nothing of his compact and weighty style.  As in the “Spectator,” topics are often introduced by a scrap of conversation by way of a text or by a letter from a correspondent setting forth some particular grievance.  The discussion is frequently illustrated by anecdotes or even by stories, though the author makes comparatively small use of her talent for fiction.  Indeed she records at one point that “Many of the Subscribers to this Undertaking ... complain that ...  I moralize too much, and that I give them too few Tales.”  The Oriental setting used by Addison with signal success is never attempted and even scandal stories are frowned upon.  Instead of the elaborate and elegantly turned illustrative narratives of the “Spectator,” Mrs. Haywood generally relates anecdotes which in spite of the disguised names savor of crude realism.  They are examples rather than illustrations of life.