Thus Harriet reads, and reading really Believes herself a young Pamela, The high-wrought whim, the tender strain Elate her mind and turn her brain: Before her glass, with smiling grace, She views the wonders of her face; There stands in admiration moveless, And hopes a Grandison, or Lovelace. And by 1804 so strait a conservative as President Dwight of Yale could refer with complacency to novelists in general, and to Sterne in particular: "Our progress resembled not a little that of my Uncle Toby; for we could hardly be said to advance at all." The earliest American novels were tentative beginnings of several sorts. The first was "The Power of Sympathy," by a Lady of Boston (Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Morton), in 1789. It was soon overshadowed by Susanna Rowson's extremely popular "Charlotte" in 1790. Both were highly-seasoned love stories. Of a different kind was H. H. Brackenridge's "Modern Chivalry" (1792-1793-1797), a rollicking satire on democracy carried on a narrative thread, with about the same right to be termed a novel as Pierce Egan's "Life in London" of a generation later. Different again was G. Imlay's "The Emigrants" (1793), a tale of the West with a conventional London plot and set of characters. And different again was Royall Tyler's "The Algerine Captive" (1797), a contemporary story combining social satire, travel, and international politics, with significant witness in the preface to the growing American vogue of the novel. When Brown came to the point of telling his own stories, however, he did not follow in the footsteps of any American predecessors, but turned to a type for which he was especially fitted--the Gothic romance. This was the first extravagant contribution of fiction to the Romantic movement,--the tale of wonder and horror, of alternating moonlit serenities and midnight storms, of haunted castles and secret chambers, of woods and vales and caves and precipices, of apparent supernaturalism which was explained away in a conscientious anticlimax, and of the same seraphic heroine and diabolical villain who had played the leading roles for Richardson. It had been developed by Horace Walpole and Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis and finally by William Godwin, who combined all this machinery into a kind of literary "tank" for the conveyance of a didactic gun crew, for his "Caleb Williams" was in fact little more than "Political Justice" in narrative camouflage. This was a formula exactly to Brown's taste, since he had both a strong ethical bias and a liking for the mysterious. His particular undertaking was to translate it into American terms, a task that he carried through in his extraordinary output of 1798 to 1801.