| [29] | Early Diary, 1889, ii. pp. 153-60. |
CHAPTER III
THE STORY OF EVELINA
At the beginning of 1778, English Literature, and especially that branch of it which consists of fiction, seems to have been suffering from a kind of sleeping sickness. The great masters who had followed upon Richardson’s success with Pamela, were gone,—as was Richardson himself. Fielding, whose last novel of Amelia had appeared in 1751, was dead; and his far younger rival, Smollett, whose Humphry Clinker came twenty years later, was also dead. Sterne was dead; Goldsmith was dead; and both Tristram Shandy and the Vicar of Wakefield had been a considerable time before the public. Johnson, whose Rasselas dated from 1759, and Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto dated from 1764, were the only living writers of fiction of any eminence, for it is impossible to give a very high place to the Julia de Roubigné of Sterne’s tearful imitator, Henry Mackenzie, or to the Champion of Virtue, which Walpole’s disciple, Miss Clara Reeve, afterwards re-named The Old English Baron. Both of these, however, belong to 1777. Apart from them, there is nothing that rises above the average level of the
“books in marble covers
About smart girls and dapper lovers,”
which formed the staple product of the Circulating Library,—those “Ventures of Jack this, and the History of Betsy t’other, and Sir Humphrys, and women with hard Christian names,” which exercised the Nurse in Colman’s Polly Honeycombe. “And then”—says the Author in his Prologue—
“And then so sentimental is the Stile,
So chaste, yet so bewitching all the while!
Plot, and elopement, passion, rape, and rapture,