She gives a list, with conjectural dates, of many medieval romances in French and English, verse and prose; but the greater part of the book is occupied with contemporary fiction, the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Crebillon, Marivaux, Rousseau, etc.  She commends Thomas Leland’s historical romance “Longsword, Earl of Salisbury” (1762), as “a romance in reality, and not a novel:—­a story like those of the Middle Ages, composed of chivalry, love, and religion.”  To her second volume she appended the “History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt,” englished from the French of Vattier, professor of Arabic to Louis XIV., who had translated it from a history of ancient Egypt written in Arabic.  This was the source of Landor’s poem, “Gebir.”  When Landor was in Wales in 1797, Rose Aylmer—­

    “Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes,
    May weep but never see”—­

lent him a copy of Miss Reeve’s “Progress of Romance,” borrowed from a circulating library at Swansea.  And so the poor forgotten thing retains a vicarious immortality, as the prompter of some of the noblest passages in modern English blank verse and as associated with one of the tenderest passages in Landor’s life.

Miss Reeve quotes frequently from Percy’s “Essay on the Ancient Minstrels,” mentions Ossian and Chatterton and refers to Hurd, Warton, and other authorities.  “It was not till I had completed my design,” she writes in her preface, “that I read either Dr. Beattie’s ’Dissertation on Fable and Romance’ or Mr. Warton’s ‘History of English Poetry.’” The former of these was an essay of somewhat more than a hundred pages by the author of “The Minstrel.”  It is of no great importance and follows pretty closely the lines of Hurd’s “Letters on Chivalry and Romance,” to which Beattie repeatedly refers in his footnotes.  The author pursues the beaten track in inquiries of the kind:  discusses the character of the Gothic tribes, the nature of the feudal system, and the institutions of chivalry and knight-errantry.  Romance, it seems, was “one of the consequences of chivalry.  The first writers in this way exhibited a species of fable different from all that had hitherto appeared.  They undertook to describe the adventures of those heroes who professed knight-errantry.  The world was then ignorant and credulous and passionately fond of wonderful adventures and deeds of valor.  They believed in giants, dwarfs, dragons, enchanted castles, and every imaginable species of necromancy.  These form the materials of the old romance.  The knight-errant was described as courteous, religious, valiant, adventurous, and temperate.  Some enchanters befriended and others opposed him.  To do his mistress honor, and to prove himself worthy of her, he was made to encounter the warrior, hew down the giant, cut the dragon in pieces, break the spell of the necromancer, demolish the enchanted castle, fly through the air on wooden or winged horses, or, with some magician for his guide, to descend unhurt through the opening earth and traverse the caves in the bottom of the ocean.  He detected and punished the false knight, overthrew or converted the infidel, restored the exiled monarch to his dominions and the captive damsel to her parents; he fought at the tournament, feasted in the hall, and bore a part in the warlike processions.”