The other example which we shall take is of even less intrinsic attraction:  in fact it is a very poor thing.  There are, however, more ways than one in which corpora vilia are good for experiment and evidence:  and we may find useful indications in the mere bookmaking of the time.  Lowndes, the fortunate publisher of Evelina, some dozen years before that windfall came, had issued, or reissued, a collection called The Novelist and professedly containing The select novels of Dr. Croxall [the ingenious author of The Fair Circassian and the part destroyer of Hereford Cathedral] and other Polite Tales.  The book is an unblushing if not an actually piratical compilation; sweeping together, with translations and adaptations published by Croxall himself at various times in the second quarter of the century and probably earlier, most of the short stories from the Spectator class of periodical which had appeared during the past two-thirds of a century.  Most of the rest are obvious (and very badly done) translations from the French and even from Cervantes’ Exemplary Novels; seasoned with personal and other anecdotes, so that the whole number of separate articles may exceed four-score.  Of these a few are interesting attempts at the historical novel or novelette—­short sketches of Mary Queen of Scots (very sympathetic and evidently French in origin from the phrase “a temple which was formerly a church"), Jane Shore (an exquisitely absurd piece of eighteenth-century middle-class modernising and moralising), Essex, Buckingham, and other likely figures.  There are cuts by the “Van-somethings and Back-somethings” of the time:  and the whole, though not worthy of anything better than the “fourpenny box,” is an evident symptom of popular taste.  The sweetmeats or hors d’oeuvre of the older caterings for that taste are here collected together to form a piece de resistance.  It is true that The Novelist is only a true title in the older sense—­that the pieces are novelle not “novels” proper.  But they are fiction, or fact treated like fiction:  and though the popular taste itself was evidently ceasing to be satisfied with these morsels and demanding a substantial joint, yet the substance was, after all, the same.

We rise higher, if not very high, with the novels of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1693-1756), one of the damned of the Dunciad, but, like some of her fellows in that Inferno, by no means deserving hopeless reprobation.  Every one who has devoted any attention to the history of the novel, as well as some who have merely considered it as a part of that of English literature generally, has noticed the curious contrast between the earlier and the later novels of this writer. Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753) could, without much difficulty, be transposed into novels of to-day. Idalia (1723) is of an entirely different mood and scheme.