praising their incomparable perfections, now fiercely reviling their follies and their sins, he succeeded in making "Euphues" the best-read book in England, and he chained with affectations and foolish conceits the free and noble current of English speech.
It was the abundance of leisure enjoyed by women that gave the ten-volumed French romance its marvelous popularity; and one sympathizes a little with Mr. Pepys, though he was such a chronic grumbler, when he laments in his diary that Mrs. Pepys would not only read "Le Grand Cyrus" all night, but would talk about it all day, "though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner," remarks this censorious husband and critic. More melancholy still to contemplate is the early appearance on the scene of female novelists who wrote vicious twaddle for other women to read. We may fancy that this particular plague is a development of the nineteenth century; but twenty years before the virtuous Pamela saw the light, Eliza Heywood was doing her little best to demoralize the minds and manners of her countrywomen. Eliza Heywood was, in Mr. Gosse's opinion,—and
