, Persia, the East and West Indies, and the North American
continent, often with peculiar geographical results. But neither Mrs.
Aubin nor Mrs. Haywood was able to use the gorgeous local color that
distinguished Mrs. Behn's "Oroonoko," and still less did they command
the realistic imagination that could make the travels of a Captain
Singleton lifelike.

Even when, as in "The Mercenary Lover," the setting is transferred to
"the Metropolis of one of the finest Islands in the World," and the
action takes place "in the neighborhood of a celebrated Church, in the
Sound of whose Bells the Inhabitants of that populous City think it an
Honour to be born,"[9] the change is unaccompanied by any attempt at
circumstantial realism. We are told that Belinda of "The British
Recluse" is a young lady of Warwickshire, that Fantomina follows her
lover to Bath in the guise of a chambermaid, or that "The Fair Hebrew"
relates the "true, but secret history of two Jewish ladies who lately
resided in London," but without the labels the settings could not be
distinguished from the vague and unidentified _mise en scene_ of such a
romance as "The Unequal Conflict." Placentia in England raves of her
passion for Philidore exactly as Alovisa in Paris, Emanuella in
Madrid,[10] or Cleomelia in Bengal expose the raptures and agonies of
their passions. The hero of "The Double Marriage" (1726) rescues a
distressed damsel in the woods outside of Plymouth exactly as one of
Ariosto's or Spenser's knights-errant might have done in the fairy
country of old romance. In the sordid tale of "Irish Artifice," printed
in Curll's "Female Dunciad" (1728), no reader could distinguish in the
romantic names Aglaura and Merovius the nationality or the meanness of a
villainous Irish housekeeper and her son. And though the tale is the
very reverse of romantic, it contains no hint of actual circumstance.
The characters in Mrs. Haywood's early fiction move in an imaginary
world, sometimes, it is true, marked with the names of real places, but
no more truly realistic than the setting of "Arcadia" or "Parthenissa."

Nor are the figures that people the eighteenth century paradise of
romance more definitely pictured than the landscape. They are generally
unindividualized, lay figures swayed by the passions of the moment, or
at best mere "humour" characters representing love's epitome,
extravagant jealousy, or eternal constancy. Pope could make a portrait
specific by the vigorous