As we look back upon the fiction of the eighteenth century it is evident that the novel, like the play, is capable of great uses and of great abuses, according to the spirit in which it is written.  In the hands of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Miss Burney, it reached a high position as a work of art.  It retained, indeed, much of the manner of the story of adventure, inasmuch as the interest was more commonly made to depend on the fortunes of a chosen hero than on the development of a well constructed plot.  But “Robinson Crusoe,” “Tom Jones,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” and “Evelina,” are works which deserve and possess the interest of the present time.  Such books as these are to be cherished as precious legacies from the years that have gone before.  They have given, in the course of their long active circulation, an incalculable amount of pleasure.  They have supplied posterity with a picturesque view of the life and manners of their ancestors which could not be acquired from any other source.  But while the fiction of the eighteenth century includes much that is valuable from a literary and from a historical point of view, it includes also a great quantity of worthless and injurious writing.  By far the larger number of novels published were of a kind likely to exert an evil influence on their readers.  Their coarseness and licentiousness had a strong tendency to disseminate the morbid thoughts and unregulated passions which dictated their production.  So general was the feeling that a work of fiction would probably contain immoral and debasing views of life, that the novel and the novelist, were both looked upon askance.  “In the republic of letters,” said Miss Burney, “there is no member of such inferior rank, or who is so much disdained by his brethren of the quill, as the humble novelist; nor is his fate less hard in the world at large, since, among the whole class of writers perhaps not one can be named of which the votaries are more numerous but less respectable.”  Miss Edgeworth, in the beginning of the present century, felt it necessary to call her first novel “a moral tale,” because so much folly, error, and vice are disseminated in books classed “under the denomination of novels.”  A great part of the fiction of the last century, as indeed of our own time, possesses neither the value of a work of art nor that belonging to the description and preservation of contemporary manners.  Nor could the excuse of the amusement they afforded be called up in their favor.  No amusement is worth having which is not healthy and innocent.  The general prejudice which formerly existed against novels very much lessened their circulation, and lessened the evil done by licentious productions.  Careful parents did not allow a novel in their children’s hands which had not passed an examination—­a precaution now too generally neglected.