The heroines of these old stories were all palpitating with sensibility, although that name had not yet been invented to describe their condition.  When they received a letter beginning “To the divine Lassellia,” or “To the incomparable Donna Emanuella,” they were thrown into the most violent disorder; “a thousand different Passions succeeded one another in their turns,” and as a rule “’twas all too sudden to admit disguise.”  When a lady in Eliza Haywood’s novels receives a note from a gentleman, “all her Limbs forget their Function, and she sinks fainting on the Bank, in much the same posture as she was before she rais’d herself a little to take the Letter.”  I am positive that Ann Lang practised this series of attitudes in the solitude of her garret.

There is no respite for the emotions from Eliza’s first page to her last.  The implacable Douxmoure (for such was her singular name) “continued for some time in a Condition little different from Madness; but when Reason had a little recovered its usual Sway, a deadly Melancholy succeeded Passion.”  When Bevillia tried to explain to her cousin that Emilius was no fit suitor for her hand, the young lady swooned twice before she seized Bevillia’s “cruel meaning;” and then—­ah! then—­“silent the stormy Passions roll’d in her tortured Bosom, disdaining the mean Ease of raging or complaining.  It was a considerable time before she utter’d the least Syllable; and when she did, she seem’d to start as from some dreadful Dream, and cry’d, ’It is enough—­in knowing one I know the whole deceiving Sex’”; and she began to address an imaginary Women’s Rights Meeting.

Plot was not a matter about which Eliza Haywood greatly troubled herself.  A contemporary admirer remarked, with justice: 

’Tis Love Eliza’s soft Affections fires; Eliza writes, but Love alone inspires; ’Tis Love that gives D’Elmont his manly Charms, And tears Amena from her Father’s Arms.

These last-named persons are the hero and heroine of Love in Excess; or The Fatal Inquiry, which seems to have been the most popular of the whole series.  This novel might be called Love Through a Window; for it almost entirely consists of a relation of how the gentleman prowled by moonlight in a garden, while the lady, in an agitated disorder, peeped out of her lattice in “a most charming Dishabillee.”  Alas! there was a lock to the door of a garden staircase, and while the lady “was paying a Compliment to the Recluse, he was dextrous enough to slip the Key out of the Door unperceived.”  Ann Lang!—­“a sudden cry of Murder, and the noise of clashing Swords,” come none too soon to save those blushes which, we hope, you had in readiness for the turning of the page!  Eliza Haywood assures us, in Idalia, that her object in writing is that “the Warmth and Vigour of Youth may be temper’d by a due Consideration”; yet the moralist must complain that she goes a strange way about it.  Idalia herself