Mrs. Haywood had sufficient skill to build up a dramatic situation, but
she invariably solves it, or rather fails to solve it, by an
interruption at the critical moment, so that the reader's interest is
continually titillated. Of a situation having in itself the germs of a
solution, she apparently had not the remotest conception. When a love
scene has been carried far enough, the coming of a servant, the sound of
a duel near by, or a seasonable outbreak of fire interrupts it. Such
devices were the common stock in trade of minor writers for the theatre.
Dramatic hacks who turned to prose fiction found it only a more
commodious vehicle for incidents and scenes already familiar to them on
the stage. In their hands the novel became simply a looser and more
extended series of sensational adventures. Accident, though tempered in
various degrees by jealousy, hatred, envy, or love, was the supreme
motivating force.

The characters of Mrs. Haywood's "Love in Excess" also inherited many
traits from the debased but glittering Sir Fopling Flutters, Mirabells,
Millamants, and Lady Wishforts of the Restoration stage. Of character
drawing, indeed, there is practically none in the entire piece; the
personages are distinguished only by the degree of their willingness to
yield to the tender passion. The story in all its intricacies may best
be described as the _vie amoureuse_ of Count D'Elmont, a hero with none
of the wit, but with all the gallantry of the rakes of late Restoration
comedy. Two parts of the novel relate the aristocratic intrigues of
D'Elmont and his friends; the third shows him, like Mrs. Centlivre's
gallants in the fifth act, reformed and a model of constancy. It would
be useless to detail the sensational extravagances of the plot in all
its ramifications, but the hero's adventures before and after marriage
may serve as a fair sample of the whole.