was “a lovely Inconsiderate” of Venice, who escaped in a “Gondula” up “the River Brent,” and set all Vicenza by the ears through her “stock of Haughtiness, which nothing could surmount.”  At last, after adventures which can scarcely have edified Ann Lang, Idalia abruptly “remember’d to have heard of a Monastery at Verona,” and left Vicenza at break of day, taking her “unguarded languishments” out of that city and out of the novel.  It is true that Ann Lang, for 2s., bought a continuation of the career of Idalia; but we need not follow her.

The perusal of so many throbbing and melting romances must necessarily have awakened in the breast of female readers a desire to see the creator of these tender scenes.  I am happy to inform my readers that there is every reason to believe that Ann Lang gratified this innocent wish.  At all events, there exists among her volumes the little book of the play sold at the doors of Drury Lane Theatre, when, in the summer of 1724, Eliza Haywood’s new comedy of A Wife to be Lett was acted there, with the author performing in the part of Mrs. Graspall.  The play itself is wretched, and tradition says that it owed what little success it enjoyed to the eager desire which the novelist’s readers felt to gaze upon her features.  She was about thirty years of age at the time; but no one says that she was handsome, and she was undoubtedly a bad actress, I think the disappointment that evening at the Theatre Royal opened the eyes of Ann Lang.  Perhaps it was the appearance of Eliza in the flesh which prevented her old admirer from buying The Secret History of Cleomina, suppos’d dead, which I miss from the collection.

If Ann Lang lived on until the publication of Pamela—­especially if during the interval she had bettered her social condition—­with what ardour must she have hailed the advent of what, with all its shortcomings, was a book worth gold.  Perhaps she went to Vauxhall with it in her muff, and shook it triumphantly at some middle-aged lady of her acquaintance.  Perhaps she lived long enough to see one great novel after another break forth to lighten the darkness of life.  She must have looked back on the pompous and lascivious pages of Eliza Haywood, with their long-drawn palpitating intrigues, with positive disgust.  The English novel began in 1740, and after that date there was always something wholesome for Ann Lang and her sisters to read.

CATS

LES CHATS. A Rotterdam, chez Jean Daniel Beman, MDCCXXVIII.

An accomplished lady of my acquaintance tells me that she is preparing an anthology of the cat.  This announcement has reminded me of one of the oddest and most entertaining volumes in my library.  People who collect prints of the eighteenth century know an engraving which represents a tom-cat, rampant, holding up an oval portrait of a gentleman and standing, in order to do so, on a volume.  The volume is