Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the number and variety of works of fiction increased with remarkable rapidity.  The female sex supplied its full share, both in amount and in excellence of work.  But those who desire to see the advent of women into new walks of active life on the ground that their presence and participation add to the purity of every occupation they adopt, can find no illustration of the theory in the connection of women with fictitious composition.  Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Heywood, the earliest female novelists, produced the most inflammatory and licentious novels of their time.  At a later period, during the eighteenth century, although some female writers exhibited a very exceptional refinement, the majority showed in this respect no marked superiority to their masculine contemporaries.  In our own time, whoever would make a list of those novels which are most evidently immoral in their teachings and licentious in their tone, would be obliged to seek them almost quite as much among the works of female writers, as among those of the rougher sex.

To write a really excellent novel, is among the most difficult of literary feats.  But to write a poor one has often been found an easy undertaking.  The apparent facility of fictitious composition has deceived great numbers of literary aspirants, and has filled the circulating libraries with a vast collection of thoroughly worthless productions.  This unfortunate fecundity, to which the department of fiction is subject, began to be conspicuous at the end of the eighteenth century,[200] and excited much opposition to novels of all kinds.  Hannah More, in her essays on female education, inveighed against the evil in terms which are quite as applicable at the present day.  “Who are those ever multiplying authors, that with unparalleled fecundity are overstocking the world with their quick-succeeding progeny?  They are novel-writers; the easiness of whose productions is at once the cause of their own fruitfulness, and of the almost infinitely numerous race of imitators to whom they give birth.  Such is the frightful facility of this species of composition, that every raw girl, while she reads, is tempted to fancy that she can also write.  And as Alexander, on perusing the Iliad, found by congenial sympathy the image of Achilles stamped on his own ardent soul, and felt himself the hero he was studying; and as Correggio, on first beholding a picture which exhibited the perfection of the graphic art, prophetically felt all his own future greatness, and cried out in rapture:  ’And I, too, am a painter!’ So a thorough-paced novel-reading miss, at the close of every tissue of hackneyed adventures, feels within herself the stirring impulse of corresponding genius, and triumphantly exclaims:  ’And I, too, am an author!’ The glutted imagination soon overflows with the redundance of cheap sentiment and plentiful incident, and, by a sort of arithmetical proportion, is enabled by the perusal of any three novels, to produce a fourth; till every fresh production, like the prolific progeny of Banquo, is followed by