in the lavish nobility of their sentiments. Mrs. Behn knew as well as Mrs. Stowe that, if you want to produce a strong effect, you must not be too chary of your colors.
When the time came for the great flowering of English fiction, when Fielding and Richardson took England by storm, and France confessed herself beaten in the field ("Who would have thought," wrote the Marquis d'Argenson, "that the English would write novels, and better ones than ours?"), then it was that women asserted themselves distinctly as patronesses well worth the pleasing. To Smollett and Defoe they had never given whole-hearted approbation. Such robustly masculine writing was scarcely in their way. But Fielding, infinitely greater than these, met with no warmer favor at their hands. It is easy to account for the present unpopularity of "Tom Joneses" in decorous households by saying that modest women do not consider it fit for them to read. That covers the ground now to perfection. But the fact remains that, when "Tom Jones" was written, everybody did consider it fit to read. Why not, when all that it contained was seen about them day by
