a little unkind in Walpole to pronounce
his disciple's performance tedious and insipid, as he did.

This same lady published, in 1785, a work in two volumes entitled "The
Progress of Romance," a sort of symposium on the history of fiction in a
series of evening conversations. Her purpose was to claim for the prose
romance an honorable place in literature; a place beside the verse epic.
She discusses the definitions of romance given in the current
dictionaries, such as Ainsworth's and Littleton's _Narratio
ficta--Scriptum eroticum--Splendida fabula_; and Johnson's "A military
fable of the Middle Ages--A tale of wild adventures of war and love."
She herself defines it as "An heroic fable," or "An epic in prose." She
affirms that Homer is the father of romance and thinks it astonishing
that men of sense "should despise and ridicule romances, as the most
contemptible of all kinds of writing, and yet expatiate in raptures on
the beauties of the fables of the old classic poets--on stories far more
wild and extravagant and infinitely more incredible." After reviewing
the Greek romances, like Heliodorus' "Theagenes and Chariclea," she
passes on to the chivalry tales of the Middle Ages, which, she maintains,
"were by no means so contemptible as they have been represented by later
writers." Our poetry, she thinks, owes more than is imagined to the
spirit of romance. "Chaucer and all our old writers abound with it.
Spenser owes perhaps his immortality to it; it is the Gothic imagery that
gives the principal graces to his work. . . Spenser has made more poets
than any other writer of our country." Milton, too, had a hankering
after the romances; and Cervantes, though he laughed Spain's chivalry
away, loved the thing he laughed at and preferred his serious romance
"Persiles and Sigismonda" to all his other works.

She gives a list, with conjectural dates, of many medieval romances in
French and English, verse and prose; but the greater part of the book is
occupied with contemporary fiction, the novels of Richardson, Fielding,
Smollett, Crebillon, Marivaux, Rousseau, etc. She commends Thomas
Leland's historical romance "Longsword, Earl of Salisbury" (1762), as "a
romance in reality, and not a novel:--a story like those of the Middle
Ages, composed of chivalry, love, and religion." To her second volume
she appended the "History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt," englished from the
French of Vattier, professor of Arabic to Louis X