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Updated: May 20, 2025
When, "I wish," continued he, "I cou'd maintain a greater figure, as well in habit as attendants, 'twou'd give a better colour to my pretences: By Hercules, I'd throw by the wallet, and soon advance all our fortunes."
Amid the conventional extravagance of this panegyric exist some useful grains of criticism. One of the most clearly expressed and continually reiterated aims of prose fiction, as of other species of writing from time immemorial, was that of conveying to the reader a moral through the agreeable channel of example. This exemplary purpose, inherited by eighteenth century novelists from Cervantes and from the French romances, was asserted again and again in Mrs. Haywood's prefaces, while the last paragraphs of nearly all her tales were used to convey an admonition or to proclaim the value of the story as a "warning to the youth of both sexes." To modern readers these pieces seem less successful illustrations of fiction made didactic, than of didacticism dissolved and quite forgot in fiction, but Sterling and other eulogists strenuously supported the novelist's claim to moral usefulness. The pill of improvement supposed to be swallowed along with the sweets of diversion hardly ever consisted of good precepts and praiseworthy actions, but usually of a warning or a horrible example of what to avoid. As a necessary corollary, the more striking and sensational the picture of guilt, the more efficacious it was likely to prove in the cause of virtue. So in the Preface to "Lasselia" , published to "remind the unthinking Part of the World, how dangerous it is to give way to Passion," the writer hopes that her unexceptionable intent "will excuse the too great Warmth, which may perhaps appear in some particular Pages; for without the Expression being invigorated in some measure proportionate to the Subject, 'twou'd be impossible for a Reader to be sensible how far it touches him, or how probable it is that he is falling into those Inadvertencies which the Examples I relate wou'd caution him to avoid." As a woman, too, Mrs. Haywood was excluded from "Learning's base Monopoly," but not from an intuitive knowledge of the passions, in which respect the sex were, and are, thought the superiors of insensible man. Consequently her chief excellence in the opinion of her readers lay in that power to "command the throbbing Breast and watry Eye" previously recognized by the Volunteer Laureate and her other admirers. She could tell a story in clear and lively, if not always correct and elegant English, and she could describe the ecstasies and agonies of passion in a way that seemed natural and convincing to an audience nurtured on French romans
Were I so brutal, cou'd thy Love comply To serve it self with base Adultery? For cou'd I love thee, cou'd I love again, Our Lives wou'd be but one continu'd Sin: A Sin of that black dye, a Sin so foul, 'Twou'd leave no Hopes of Heav'n for either's Soul. Dia. Dull Man! Dost think a feeble vain Excuse Shall satisfy me for this Night's abuse?
I am not us'd to flatter much; if forty Years were taken from your Age, 'twou'd render you something more agreeable to my Bed, I must confess. Sir Cau. Ay, ay, no doubt on't. L. Ful.
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