certain volumes of poems that no gentleman's library ought to be
without, the bookselling enterprise shows that the novelist had more
strings than one to her bow.

By one expedient or another Mrs. Haywood managed to exist fourteen years
longer and during that time wrote the best remembered of her works. Copy
from her pen supplied her publisher, Thomas Gardner, with a succession
of novels modeled on the French fiction of Marivaux and De Mouhy, with
periodical essays reminiscent of Addison, with moral letters, and with
conduct books of a nondescript but popular sort. The hard-worked
authoress even achieved a new reputation on the success of her
"Fortunate Foundlings" (1744), "Female Spectator" (1744-6), and her most
ambitious novel, "The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" (1751). The
productions known to be hers do not certainly represent the entire
output of her industry during this period, for since "The Dunciad" her
writing had been almost invariably anonymous. One or two equivocal bits
of secret history and scandal-mongering may probably be attributed to
her at the very time when in "Epistles for the Ladies" (1749-50) she was
advocating sobriety, religion, and morality. These suspected lapses into
her old habits should serve as seasoning to the statement of the
"Biographia Dramatica" that Eliza Haywood was "in mature age, remarkable
for the most rigid and scrupulous decorum, delicacy, and prudence, both
with respect to her conduct and conversation." If she was not too old a
dog to learn new tricks, she at least did not forget her old ones. Of
her circumstances during her last years little can be discovered. "The
Female Spectator," in emulation of its famous model, commences with a
pen-portrait of the writer, which though not intended as an accurate
picture, certainly contains no flattering lines. It shows the essayist
both conscious of the faults of her youth and willing to make capital
out of them.