lared that the miserable fate of Count
Fathom would deter his reader from similar courses by a fear of similar
punishment, when Defoe urged the moral usefulness of "Moll Flanders"
and "Roxana," the two novelists simply expressed the general feeling
that the sight of a malefactor hanging on the gallows was the most
effective recommendation to virtue. In the same spirit in which justice
exposed the offender in the stocks to public view, the novelist
described his careers of vice ending in misery, and Hogarth conducted
his Idle Apprentice from stage to stage till Tyburn Hill is reached.
The same moral end is always in view, but the lesson is illustrated by
the ugliness of vice, and not by the beauty of virtue. In our time we
have reason to be thankful for a criminal legislation tempered by mercy
and philanthropy. We have attained, too, a standard of taste and of
humanity which has banished the degrading exhibitions of public
punishments, which has largely done away with coarseness and brutality,
and has added much to the happiness of life. In fiction, the writer who
wishes to serve a moral purpose attains his end by the more agreeable
method of holding up examples of merit to be imitated, rather than of
vice to be shunned.

But when the great novelists of the eighteenth century were writing,
the standard of taste was extremely low. The author knew that he was
keeping his reader in bad company, and was supplying his mind with
coarse ideas, but he believed that he might do this without offense.
Defoe thought that "Moll Flanders" would not "offend the chastest
reader or the modestest hearer"; Richardson, that the prolonged effort
to seduce Pamela could be described "without raising a single idea
throughout the whole that shall shock the exactest purity"; Fielding,
that there was nothing in "Tom Jones" which "could offend the chastest
eye in the perusal." Nor, as concerned their own time, were they
mistaken. They clearly understood the distinction between coarseness
and immorality. The young women who read "Tom Jones" with enthusiasm
were not less moral than the women who now avoid it, they were only
less refined. They did not think vice less reprehensible, but were more
accustomed to the sight of it, and therefore less easily offended by
its description.

While the novels of which we have been speaking were making their first
appearance, there lived in Kent a charming young lady who went by the
name of "the celebrated Miss