Read, proud Usurper, read with conscious Shame,
Pathetic _Behn_, or _Mauley's_ greater Name;
Forget their Sex, and own when _Haywood_ writ,
She clos'd the fair Triumvirate of Wit;
Born to delight as to reform the Age,
She paints Example thro' the shining Page;
Satiric Precept warms the moral Tale,
And Causticks burn where the mild Balsam fails; [_sic_]
A Task reserv'd for her, to whom 'tis given,
To stand the Proxy of vindictive Heav'n!"

Amid the conventional extravagance of this panegyric exist some useful
grains of criticism. One of the most clearly expressed and continually
reiterated aims of prose fiction, as of other species of writing from
time immemorial, was that of conveying to the reader a moral through the
agreeable channel of example. This exemplary purpose, inherited by
eighteenth century novelists from Cervantes and from the French
romances, was asserted again and again in Mrs. Haywood's prefaces,[23]
while the last paragraphs of nearly all her tales were used to convey an
admonition or to proclaim the value of the story as a "warning to the
youth of both sexes." To modern readers these pieces seem less
successful illustrations of fiction made didactic, than of didacticism
dissolved and quite forgot in fiction, but Sterling and other eulogists
strenuously supported the novelist's claim to moral usefulness.[24] The
pill of improvement supposed to be swallowed along with the sweets of
diversion hardly ever consisted of good precepts and praiseworthy
actions, but usually of a warning or a horrible example of what to
avoid.[25] As a necessary corollary, the more striking and sensational
the picture of guilt, the more efficacious it was likely to prove in the
cause of virtue. So in the Preface to "Lasselia" (1723), published to