In our time we have reason to be thankful for a criminal legislation tempered by mercy and philanthropy. We have attained, too, a standard of taste and of humanity which has banished the degrading exhibitions of public punishments, which has largely done away with coarseness and brutality, and has added much to the happiness of life. In fiction, the writer who wishes to serve a moral purpose attains his end by the more agreeable method of holding up examples of merit to be imitated, rather than of vice to be shunned. But when the great novelists of the eighteenth century were writing, the standard of taste was extremely low. The author knew that he was keeping his reader in bad company, and was supplying his mind with coarse ideas, but he believed that he might do this without offense. Defoe thought that "Moll Flanders" would not "offend the chastest reader or the modestest hearer"; Richardson, that the prolonged effort to seduce Pamela could be described "without raising a single idea throughout the whole that shall shock the exactest purity"; Fielding, that there was nothing in "Tom Jones" which "could offend the chastest eye in the perusal." Nor, as concerned their own time, were they mistaken. They clearly understood the distinction between coarseness and immorality. The young women who read "Tom Jones" with enthusiasm were not less moral than the women who now avoid it, they were only less refined. They did not think vice less reprehensible, but were more accustomed to the sight of it, and therefore less easily offended by its description.