Thus it was that for a long time Defoe and Fielding, Smollett and Sterne found no imitators in America. The American novel-reader, for the most part, was content with British provender, and satisfied his appetite for the marvellous with Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto,” Lewis’ “Monk,” and Mrs. Radcliffe’s “Romance of the Forest” and “The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Toward the end of the eighteenth century several writers essayed the novel, but not with lasting success. In “The Foresters” (published serially in _The Columbian Magazine_, and in book form in 1792), Jeremy Belknap (1774-98) produced an ingenious though trivial allegorical tale of the colonisation of America and the rebellion of the colonies. In this, Peter Bullfrog stood for New York, Ethan Greenwood for Vermont, Walter Pipeweed for Virginia, Charles Indigo for South Carolina, and so on. Ann Eliza Bleecker (1752-83) was the author of “The History of Maria Kittle,” which in the form of a letter sets forth some harrowing experiences among the savages during the French and Indian War; and of “The Story of Henry and Anne,” a tale, “founded on fact,” of the misfortunes of some German peasants who finally settled in America; both of these were published posthumously in her “Works” in 1793. Mrs. Susanna Haswell Rowson’s “Charlotte Temple” (1790), a story of love, betrayal, and desertion, despite its absurdly stilted phrases and its long-drawn melancholy, has ever been popular with a certain class of readers; the editor of the latest edition (1905), Mr. Francis W. Halsey, has examined 104 editions, and his list is incomplete. An avowed antidote to “Charlotte Temple,” Mrs. Tabitha G. Tenney’s satirical “Female Quixotism” (1808), suggests to Professor Trent “an expurgated Smollett”; it is now unknown. Mrs. Hannah W. Foster, the wife of a clergyman in Massachusetts, wrote “The Coquette, or The History of Eliza Wharton, a Novel Founded on Fact” (1797), a story of desertion, showing the marked influence of Richardson. In the same year, appeared “The Algerine Captive,” by Royall Tyler, who was one of the first to turn to American life as a fruitful subject for fiction. His story is a broadly humorous picaresque tale, of the Smollett type, which introduces rather too many wearisome details of customs in Algiers; a fault for which his generally spirited style and his powerful description of the horrors of a slave-ship partially atone.