That many of the ideas in the preface to _Ibrahim_ were not new even in 1641 becomes plain if one reads the discussions of romance written by Giraldi Cinthio and Tasso.[2] The particular way in which Mlle. de Scudéry attempted to carry out those ideas in her later, more subjective works she obligingly set forth in _Clélie_ in the passage already alluded to. There it is explained that a well-contrived romance "is not only handsomer than the truth, but withal, more probable;" that "impossible things, and such as are low and common, must almost equally be avoided;" that each person in the story must always act according to his own "temper;" that "the nature of the passions ought necessarily to be understood, and what they work in the hearts of those who are possess'd with them." He who attempts an "ingenious Fable" must have great accomplishments--wit, fancy, judgment, memory; "an universal knowledge of the World, of the Interest of Princes, and the humors of Nations," and of both closet-policy and the art of war; familiarity with "politeness of conversation, the art of ingenious raillery, and that of making innocent Satyrs; nor must he be ignorant of that of composing of Verses, writing Letters, and making Orations." The "secrets of all hearts" must be his and "how to take away plainness and driness from Morality."[3] The assumption that the new prose fiction could be judged, as the Scudérys professed to judge their work, first of all by reference to the rules of heroic poetry is frequent in the next century--in the unlikely Mrs. Davys (preface, _Works_, 1725); in _Joseph Andrews_ of course, where the rules of the serious epic and of the heroic romance are to aid the author in copying the ancient but, as it happens, nonexistent comic epic; and in Fielding's preface to his sister's _David Simple_ (1744). Both Richardson and Fielding were attacked on epic grounds.[4] Dr. Johnson's interesting and unfriendly essay on recent prose fiction (_Rambler_ No. 4) adopted the terminology familiar in the criticism of epic and romance and showed that Johnson, unlike d'Argens and Fielding, did not intend to give any of the old doctrines new meanings in a way to justify realism. Johnson laughed a little in that essay at the heroic romances; but like Mlle. de Scudéry, whose _Conversations_ he drew on for a footnote in his edition of Shakespeare (1765),[5] he believed that fiction should be "probable" and yet should idealize life and men and observe poetic Justice. Many other writers on prose fiction borrowed the old neo-classic rules, and they applied them often so carelessly and so insincerely that one is glad to come eventually on signs of rebellion, even if from the sentimentalists: "I know not," wrote Elizabeth Griffith in the preface to _The Delicate Distress_ (1769), "whether novel, like the _epopée_, has any rules, peculiar to itself.... Sensibility is, in my mind, as necessary, as taste, to intitle us to judge of a work, like this."