Now tho' I count myself no Zero,
I don't pretend to be an hero.
Or a by-blow of him that thunders,
Nor are you one of the sev'n wonders.
But a young damser very pretty,
And your true name is Mistress Betty.
With Mrs. Lennox and Mrs. Monk we seem to come to the end of the satire on the romance-reading girls. But in 1756 we find in Murphy's Apprentice a young man, a Mr. Gargle, an apothecary's apprentice, whose wits have gone astray through reading romances. "An absurd, ridiculous, a silly empty-headed coxcomb," exclaims his exasperated father, "with his Cassanders and his Cloppatras, and his trumpery; with his Romances, and his damn'd plays and his Odyssey Popes, and a parcel of fellows not worth a groat!" Charlotte, Mr. Gargle's innamorata, was "as innocent as water-gruel" before he taught her to read play-books; but she was not permanently injured by them, for before she had read far her father locked her books away and confined her in her room. In the projected romantic escape Charlotte is all practicality and good sense, but Mr. Gargle demands rope-ladders, moonlight, emotions, attitudes, and poetical quotations, and so spoils all.
But Mr. Gargle lags behind his generation. Romances were being rapidly replaced by the novel. Between 1740 and 1753 Pamela, Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild, Clarissa Harlowe, Tom Jones, Amelia, and Sir Charles Grandison had established the new species. And the romance-reading girl speedily gives way to the novel-reading girl.
The first representative of this type comes in 1760 in George Colman's Polly Honeycomb, at the very end of the period we are considering. In the Prologue Colman shows a clear recognition of the change of type. He says:
Hither in days of yore, from Spain or France,