had saved in Persia. Meanwhile Placentia, whose fortune is now no match
for Philidore's, flees to parts unknown, leaving a letter conjuring him
to forget her. After a long search the brother and lover find her place
of concealment, and the former removes her scruples by settling a large
estate upon her. "Nothing could be more splendid than the celebration of
their nuptials; and of their future bliss, the reader may better judge
by their almost unexampled love, their constancy, their generosity and
nobleness of soul, than by any description I am able to give of it."

"Philidore and Placentia" is one of the few novels by Mrs. Haywood that
do not pretend to a moral purpose. Realism needed some justification,
for realism at the time almost invariably meant a picture of vice and
folly, and an author could not expose objectionable things except in the
hope that they would lessen in fact as they increased in fiction. But in
spite of the disapproval sometimes expressed for fables on the ground of
their inherent untruth, idealistic romances were generally justified as
mirrors of all desirable virtues. Pious Mrs. Penelope Aubin wrote no
other kind of fiction, though she sometimes admitted a deep-dyed villain
for the sake of showing his condign punishment at the hands of
providence. It was perhaps due to the sale of this lady's novels,
largely advertised toward the end of 1727 and apparently very
successful, that Mrs. Haywood was encouraged to desert her favorite
field of exemplary novels showing the dangerous effects of passion for
an excursion into pure romance. That she found the attempt neither
congenial nor profitable may be inferred from the fact that it was not
repeated.

If the highly imaginary romances suffered from an excess of delicacy,
certain other tales by Mrs. Haywood overleaped decency as far on the
other side. The tendency of fiction before Richardson was not toward