of poetry the
only too obvious moral of the lady of quality's correspondence. The
author remembers how "a Lady of my Acquaintance, perhaps not without
reason, fell one day, as she was sitting with me, into this Poetical
Exclamation:

'The Pen can furrow a fond Female's Heart,
And pierce it more than Cupid's talk'd-of Dart:
Letters, a kind of Magick Virtue have,
And, like strong Philters, human Souls enslave!'"

After thirty pages of moralizing the writer comes to a conclusion with
the reflection, a commonplace of her novels, that "if the little I have
done, may give occasion to some abler Pen to expose [such indiscretions]
more effectually, I shall think myself happy in having given a hint,
which improv'd, may be of so general a Service to my Sex." But the
impression left by this and others of Mrs. Haywood's works is that the
fair novelist was not so much interested in preventing the
inadvertencies of her sex as in exposing them.

The tender passion was still the theme in "Love-Letters on All Occasions
Lately passed between Persons of Distinction," which contains a number
of letters, mainly disconnected, devoted to the warmer phases of
gallantry. Some are essays in little on definite subjects: levity,
sincerity, the pleasures of conjugal affection, insensibility, and so
on. Most of them, however, are occasional: "Strephon to Dalinda, on her
forbidding him to speak of Love," "Orontes to Deanira, entreating her to
give him a meeting," and many others in which both the proper names and
the situations suggest the artificial romances. None of the missives
reveals emotions of any but the most tawdry romantic kind, warm desires
extravagantly uttered, conventional doubts, causeless jealousies, and
petty quarrels. Like Mrs. Behn's correspondence with the amorous Van
Bruin these epistles have nothing to distinguish them except their
excessive hyperbole. There is one series of twenty-four connected
letters on the model of "Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier,"
relating the love story of Theano and Elismonda, but in the course of
the whole correspondence nothing more momentous occurs than the lover's
leaving town. Indeed so imperceptible is the narrative element in Mrs.
Haywood's epistolary sequences that they can make no claim to share with
the anonymous love story in letters entitled "Love's Posy" (1686), with
the "Letters Written By Mrs. Manley" (1696),[4] or with Tom Brown's
"Adventures of Lindamira" (1702