ve-stories.]

Most of the rest, putting aside the doubtful _Henriette de Moliere_
already referred to, are collections of love-stories, which their
titles, rather than their contents, would seem to have represented to
the ordinary commentator as loose. There is really very little
impropriety, except of the mildest kind, in any of them,[218] and they
chiefly consist of the kind of quasi-historic anecdote (only better
told) which is not uncommon in English, as, for instance, in Croxall's
_Novelist_. They are rather well written, but for the most part consist
of very "public" material, scarcely made "private" by any striking
merit, and distinguished by curious liberties with history, if not with
morals.

[Sidenote: Their historic liberties.]

[Sidenote: _Carmente_, etc.]

For instance, in one of her _Amours Galantes_ the
Elfrida-Ethelwold-Edgar story is told, not only with "_Edward I._ of
England" for the deceived and revengeful king, but with a further and
more startling intrusion of Eleanor of Guyenne! That of Inez de Castro
is treated in a still more audacious manner. Also (with what previous
example I know not, but Hortense was exceedingly apt to have previous
examples) the names of the heretic to whom Dante was not merciful and of
his beloved Margaret--names to which Charles Kingsley made the atonement
of two of the most charming of his neglected poems--appear as "Dulcin"
and "Marguerite," King and Queen of Lombardy, but guilty of more
offensive lubricity than the sternest inquisitor ever charged on the
historical Dolcino and his sect. For this King and Queen set up, in cold
blood, two courts of divorce, in one of which each is judge, with the
direct purpose of providing themselves with a supply of temporary wives
and husbands. Some have maintained that no less a thing than the
_Princesse de Cleves_ itself was suggested by something of Mme. de
Villedieu's; but this seems to me merely the usual plagiarism-hunter's
blunder of forgetting that the treatment, not the subject, is the _crux_
of originality. Of her longer books, _Alcidamie_, the first, has been
spoken of. The _Amours des Grandes Hommes_ and _Cleonice ou le Roman
Galant_ belong to the "keyed" Heroics; while the _Journal Amoureux_,
which runs to nearly five hundred pages, has Diane de Poitiers for its
chief heroine. Lastly, _Carmente_ (or, as it was reprinted, _Carmante_)
is a sort of mixed pastoral, with Theocritus himself introduced, after a
fashion note