okmaking of
the time. Lowndes, the fortunate publisher of _Evelina_, some dozen
years before that windfall came, had issued, or reissued, a collection
called _The Novelist_ and professedly containing _The select novels of
Dr. Croxall_ [the ingenious author of _The Fair Circassian_ and the part
destroyer of Hereford Cathedral] _and other Polite Tales_. The book is
an unblushing if not an actually piratical compilation; sweeping
together, with translations and adaptations published by Croxall himself
at various times in the second quarter of the century and probably
earlier, most of the short stories from the _Spectator_ class of
periodical which had appeared during the past two-thirds of a century.
Most of the rest are obvious (and very badly done) translations from the
French and even from Cervantes' _Exemplary Novels_; seasoned with
personal and other anecdotes, so that the whole number of separate
articles may exceed four-score. Of these a few are interesting attempts
at the historical novel or novelette--short sketches of Mary Queen of
Scots (very sympathetic and evidently French in origin from the phrase
"a _temple_ which was formerly a church"), Jane Shore (an exquisitely
absurd piece of eighteenth-century middle-class modernising and
moralising), Essex, Buckingham, and other likely figures. There are cuts
by the "Van-somethings and Back-somethings" of the time: and the whole,
though not worthy of anything better than the "fourpenny box," is an
evident symptom of popular taste. The sweetmeats or _hors d'oeuvre_ of
the older caterings for that taste are here collected together to form a
_piece de resistance_. It is true that _The Novelist_ is only a true
title in the older sense--that the pieces are _novelle_ not "novels"
proper. But they are fiction, or fact treated like fiction: and though
the popular taste itself was evidently ceasing to be satisfied with
these morsels and demanding a substantial joint, yet the substance was,
after all, the same.

We rise higher, if not very high, with the novels of Mrs. Eliza Haywood
(1693-1756), one of the damned of the _Dunciad_, but, like some of her
fellows in that _Inferno_, by no means deserving hopeless reprobation.
Every one who has devoted any attention to the history of the novel, as
well as some who have merely considered it as a part of that of English
literature generally, has noticed the curious contrast between the
earlier and the later novels of this writer. _Bet