five or six editions. Their style, as well as that of the
Astrea, is diffuse and languid; yet Zaide, and the Princess of Cleves,
are masterpieces of the kind. Such works formed the first studies of
Rousseau, who, with his father, would sit up all night, till warned by
the chirping of the swallows how foolishly they had spent it! Some
incidents in his Nouvelle Heloise have been retraced to these sources;
and they certainly entered greatly into the formation of his character.

Such romances at length were regarded as pernicious to good sense,
taste, and literature. It was in this light they were considered by
Boileau, after he had indulged in them in his youth.

A celebrated Jesuit pronounced an oration against these works. The
rhetorician exaggerates and hurls his thunders on flowers. He entreats
the magistrates not to suffer foreign romances to be scattered amongst
the people, but to lay on them heavy penalties, as on prohibited goods;
and represents this prevailing taste as being more pestilential than the
plague itself. He has drawn a striking picture of a family devoted to
romance-reading; he there describes women occupied day and night with
their perusal; children just escaped from the lap of their nurse
grasping in their little hands the fairy tales; and a country squire
seated in an old arm-chair, reading to his family the most wonderful
passages of the ancient works of chivalry.

These romances went out of fashion with our square-cocked hats: they had
exhausted the patience of the public, and from them sprung NOVELS. They
attempted to allure attention by this inviting title, and reducing their
works from ten to two volumes. The name of romance, including imaginary
heroes and extravagant passions, disgusted; and they substituted scenes
of domestic life, and touched our common feelings by pictures of real
nature. Heroes were not now taken from the throne: they were sometimes
even sought after amongst the lowest ranks of the people. Scarron seems
to allude sarcastically to this degradation of the heroes of Fiction:
for in hinting at a new comic history he had projected, he tells us that
he gave it up suddenly because he had "heard that his hero had just been
hanged at Mans."

NOVELS, as they were long _manufactured_, form a library of illiterate
authors for illiterate readers; but as they are _created_ by genius, are
precious to the philosopher. They paint the character of an individual
or the manners of the age