mere good luck, and not the effect of reason and judgment." In
the second paper Sappho quotes examples of generous love from Suckling
and Milton, but takes offence at a letter containing some sarcastic
remarks on married women. We know that Steele was personally acquainted
with Mrs. Manley, and it is possible that he knew Mrs. Haywood, since
she later dedicated a novel to him. With some reservation, then, we may
accept this sketch as a fair likeness. As a young matron of seventeen or
eighteen she was evidently a lively, unconventional, opinionated
gadabout fond of the company of similar She-romps, who exchanged verses
and specimen letters with the lesser celebrities of the literary world
and perpetuated the stilted romantic traditions of the Matchless Orinda
and her circle. A woman of her independence of mind, we may imagine,
could not readily submit to the authority of an arbitrary, orthodox
clergyman husband.

Mrs. Haywood's writings are full of the most lively scenes of marital
infelicity due to causes ranging from theological disputes to flagrant
licentiousness. Her enemies were not so charitable as to attribute her
flight from her husband to any reason so innocent as incompatibility of
temper or discrepancy of religious views. The position of ex-wife was
neither understood nor tolerated by contemporary society. In the words
of a favorite quotation from "Jane Shore":

"But if weak Woman chance to go astray,
If strongly charm'd she leave the thorny Way,
And in the softer Paths of Pleasure stray,
Ruin ensues, Reproach and endless Shame;
And one false Step entirely damns her Fame:
In vain, with Tears, the Loss she may deplore,
In vain look back to what she was before,
She sets, like Stars that fall, to rise no more!"

Eliza Haywood, however, after leaving the thorny way of matrimony,
failed to carry out the laureate's metaphor. Having less of the fallen
star in her than Mr. Rowe imagined, and perhaps more of the hen, she
refused to set, but resolutely faced the world, and in spite of all
rules of decorum, tried to earn a living for herself and her two
children, if indeed as Pope's slander implies, she had children to
support.

The ways in which a woman could win her bread outside the pale of
matrimony were extremely limited. A stage career, connected with a
certain degree of infamy, had been open to the sex since Restoration
times, and writing for the theatre had been successfully practiced by
Mr