or a
servant-girl. There are five novels in this little collection, and
a play, and a pamphlet of poems, and a bundle of love-letters, all
signed upon their title-pages by the Ouida of the period, the great
Eliza Haywood.

No one who has not dabbled among old books knows how rare have become
the strictly popular publications of a non-literary kind which a
generation of the lower middle class has read and thrown away. Eliza
Haywood lives in the minds of men solely through one very coarse and
cruel allusion to her made by Pope in the _Dunciad_. She was never
recognised among people of intellectual quality; she ardently desired
to belong to literature, but her wish was never seriously gratified,
even by her friend Aaron Hill. Yet she probably numbered more readers,
for a year or two, than any other person in the British realm. She
poured forth what she called "little Performances" from a tolerably
respectable press; and the wonder is that in these days her abundant
writings are so seldom to be met with. The secret doubtless is that
her large public consisted almost wholly of people like Ann Lang.
Eliza was read by servants in the kitchen, by seamstresses, by
basket-women, by 'prentices of all sorts, male and female, but mostly
the latter. For girls of this sort there was no other reading of a
light kind in 1724. It was Eliza Haywood or nothing. The men of the
same class read Defoe; but he, with his cynical severity, his absence
of all pity for a melting mood, his savagery towards women, was not
likely to be preferred by "straggling nymphs." The footman might read
_Roxana_, and the hackney-writer sit up after his toil over _Moll
Flanders_; there was much in these romances to interest men. But what
had Ann Lang to do with stories so cold and harsh? She read Eliza
Haywood.

But most of her sisters, of Eliza's great _clientele_, did not know
how to treat a book. They read it to tatters, and they threw it away.
It may be news to some readers that these early novels were very
cheap. Ann Lang bought _Love in Excess_, which is quite a thick
volume, for two shillings; and the first volume of _Idalia_ (for Eliza
was Ouidaesque even in her titles) only cost her eighteen-pence. She
seems to have been a clean girl. She did not drop warm lard on the
leaves. She did not tottle up her milk-scores on the bastard-title.
She did not scribble in the margin "Emanuella is a foul wench." She
did not dog's-ear her little library, or stain it,