Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE STORY OF EVELINA At the beginning of 1778, English Literature, and especially that branch of it which consists of fiction, seems to have been suffering from a kind of sleeping sickness. The great masters who had followed upon Richardson's success with Pamela, were gone,—as was Richardson himself. Fielding, whose last novel of Amelia had appeared in 1751, was dead; and his far younger rival, Smollett, whose Humphry Clinker came twenty years later, was also dead. Sterne was dead; Goldsmith was dead; and both Tristram Shandy and the Vicar of Waltefield had been a considerable time before the public. Johnson, whose Basselas dated from 1759, and Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto dated from 1764, were the only living writers of fiction of any eminence, for it is impossible to give a very high place to the Julia de Eoubigne of Sterne's tearful imitator, Henry Mackenzie, or to the Champion of Virtue, which Walpole's disciple, Miss Clara Reeve, afterwards re-named The Old English Baron. Both of these, however, belong to 1777. Apart from them, there is nothing that rises above the average level of the " books in marble covers About smart girls and dapper lovers," which formed the staple product of the Circulating Library,—those " Ventures of Jack this, and the History of Betsy t'other, and Sir Humphrys, and women with hard Christian names," which exercised the Nurse in Colman's Polly Honeycombc. " And then " —says the Author in his Prologue— " And then so sentimental is the Stile, So chaste, yet so bewitching all the while ! Plot, and elopement, passion, rape, and rapture, The total sum of ev"ry dear—dear—Chapter." Of these latter and minor performances, perhaps the only one which—for the moment—deserves a passing mention is the Excursion of Mrs. Fra...