William Painter, her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's clerk of ordnance
in the Tower, is an excellent instance. Stricken by a moral panic,
he advertised that from his delectable "Palace of Pleasure" the
young might "learne how to avoyde the ruine, overthrow,
inconvenience and displeasure, that lascivious desire and wanton
evil doth bring to their suters and pursuers"--a disingenuous sop
to the Puritans. His contemporary,

Geoffrey Fenton, who also turned to story-making, opines that in
histories "the dignitye of vertue and fowelenes of vice appereth
muche more lyvelye then in any morall teachynge," although he knew
that his "histories" were the sheerest, if not the purest, of
fiction, with any moral purpose that might exist chiefly of his
own creating. A century and more later Eliza Haywood, the
ambiguous author of many ambiguous novels of the eighteenth
century, prefaces her "Life's Progress Through the Passions" (an
ambiguous title) with like hypocrisy: "I am enemy to all romances,
novels, and whatever carries the air of them. . . . It is a
_real_, not a _fictitious_ character I am about to present"--which is
merely another instance of fiction disguising itself, this time, I
regret to say, as immorality in real life. And so they all go, forever
implying that fiction is frivolous or immoral or worthless, until it
is not surprising that, as Mr. Bradsher has reminded us, the elder
Timothy Dwight of Yale College was able to assert, "Between the Bible
and novels there is a gulf fixed which few novel-readers are willing
to pass." Richardson was forced to defend himself, so was Sterne, so
was Fielding, so was Goldsmith. Dr. Johnson was evidently making
concessions when he advised romances as reading for youth. Jeffrey,
the critic and tyrant of the next century, summed it all up when he