Accordingly Miss Reeve undertook to admit only a rather mild dose of the marvelous in her romance.  Like Walpole she professed to be simply the editor of the story, which she said that she had transcribed or translated from a manuscript in the Old English language, a now somewhat threadbare device.  The period was the fifteenth century, in the reign of Henry VI., and the scene England.  But, in spite of the implication of its sub-title, the fiction is much less “Gothic” than its model, and its modernness of sentiment and manners is hardly covered with even the faintest wash of mediaevalism.  As in Walpole’s book, there are a murder and a usurpation, a rightful heir defrauded of his inheritance and reared as a peasant.  There are a haunted chamber, unearthly midnight groans, a ghost in armor, and a secret closet with its skeleton.  The tale is infinitely tiresome, and is full of that edifying morality, fine sentiment and stilted dialogue—­that “old perfumed, powdered D’Arblay conversation,” as Thackeray called it—­which abound in “Evelina,” “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” and almost all the fiction of the last quarter of the last century.  Still it was a little unkind in Walpole to pronounce his disciple’s performance tedious and insipid, as he did.

This same lady published, in 1785, a work in two volumes entitled “The Progress of Romance,” a sort of symposium on the history of fiction in a series of evening conversations.  Her purpose was to claim for the prose romance an honorable place in literature; a place beside the verse epic.  She discusses the definitions of romance given in the current dictionaries, such as Ainsworth’s and Littleton’s Narratio ficta—­Scriptum eroticum—­Splendida fabula; and Johnson’s “A military fable of the Middle Ages—­A tale of wild adventures of war and love.”  She herself defines it as “An heroic fable,” or “An epic in prose.”  She affirms that Homer is the father of romance and thinks it astonishing that men of sense “should despise and ridicule romances, as the most contemptible of all kinds of writing, and yet expatiate in raptures on the beauties of the fables of the old classic poets—­on stories far more wild and extravagant and infinitely more incredible.”  After reviewing the Greek romances, like Heliodorus’ “Theagenes and Chariclea,” she passes on to the chivalry tales of the Middle Ages, which, she maintains, “were by no means so contemptible as they have been represented by later writers.”  Our poetry, she thinks, owes more than is imagined to the spirit of romance.  “Chaucer and all our old writers abound with it.  Spenser owes perhaps his immortality to it; it is the Gothic imagery that gives the principal graces to his work. . .  Spenser has made more poets than any other writer of our country.”  Milton, too, had a hankering after the romances; and Cervantes, though he laughed Spain’s chivalry away, loved the thing he laughed at and preferred his serious romance “Persiles and Sigismonda” to all his other works.