It was suggested very sensibly to Mackenzie, that the interest of most works of fiction depended on the _designing_ villainy of one or more characters, and that in actual life calamities were more often brought about by the innocent errors of the sufferers. To place this view before his readers, Mackenzie wrote "Julia de Roubigne," in which a wife brings death upon herself and her husband by indiscreetly, though innocently, arousing his jealousy. Sir Walter Scott ranked this novel among the "most heart-wringing histories" that ever were written--a description which justly becomes it. Mackenzie's aim was less to weave a complicated plot, than to study and move the heart; and to the lover of sentiment his novels may still be attractive. The "Fool of Quality," by Henry Brooke, has had a singular history. The author was a young Irishman of a fine figure, a well-stored mind, and a disposition of particular gentleness. He was loved by Pope and Lyttleton, caressed by the Prince of Wales, and honored by the friendly interest of Jonathan Swift. Married before he was twenty-one to a young girl who presented him with three children before she was eighteen, his life was a constant struggle to provide for a family which increased with every year. After a long period of active life, passed in literary occupations, he retired to an obscure part of Ireland, and there died, attended by a daughter, the only survivor of twenty-two children, who remembered nothing of her father "previous to his retirement from the world; and knew little of him, save that he bore the infirmities and misfortunes of his declining years with the heroism of true Christianity, and that he was possessed of virtues and feelings which shone forth to the last moment of his life, unimpaired by the distractions of pain, and unshaken amid the ruins of genius."[194]