r eulogists
strenuously supported the novelist's claim to moral usefulness.[24] The
pill of improvement supposed to be swallowed along with the sweets of
diversion hardly ever consisted of good precepts and praiseworthy
actions, but usually of a warning or a horrible example of what to
avoid.[25] As a necessary corollary, the more striking and sensational
the picture of guilt, the more efficacious it was likely to prove in the
cause of virtue. So in the Preface to "Lasselia" (1723), published to
"remind the unthinking Part of the World, how dangerous it is to give
way to Passion," the writer hopes that her unexceptionable intent "will
excuse the too great Warmth, which may perhaps appear in some particular
Pages; for without the Expression being invigorated in some measure
proportionate to the Subject, 'twou'd be impossible for a Reader to be
sensible how far it touches him, or how probable it is that he is
falling into those Inadvertencies which the Examples I relate wou'd
caution him to avoid." As a woman, too, Mrs. Haywood was excluded from
"Learning's base Monopoly," but not from an intuitive knowledge of the
passions, in which respect the sex were, and are, thought the superiors
of insensible man.[26] Consequently her chief excellence in the opinion
of her readers lay in that power to "command the throbbing Breast and
watry Eye" previously recognized by the Volunteer Laureate and her other
admirers. She could tell a story in clear and lively, if not always
correct and elegant English, and she could describe the ecstasies and
agonies of passion in a way that seemed natural and convincing to an
audience nurtured on French _romans a longue haleine_ and heroic plays.
Unworthy as they may seem when placed beside the subsequent triumphs of
the novel, her short romances nevertheless kept alive the spirit of
idealistic fiction and stimulated an interest in the emotions during an
age when even poetry had become the handmaid of reason.

But although Eliza had few rivals as an "arbitress of the passions," she
did not enjoy an equal success as the "proxy of vindictive heaven." When
she attempted to apply the caustic of satire instead of the mild balsam
of moral tales, she speedily made herself enemies. From the very first
indeed she had been persecuted by those who had an inveterate habit of
detecting particular persons aimed at in the characters of her
fictions,[27] and even without their aspersions her path was
sufficiently