The important principle of prose fiction which Richardson and Warburton recognized--that there is power in a detailed picture of the private life of the middle class--had been suggested earlier. Mrs. Manley could not voice it, at least not in _Queen Zarah_, where the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Godolphln, and Queen Anne were to be leading characters. But her sometime-friend Richard Steele could. Having laughed in _The Tender Husband_ (1705) at a girl whose judgment of life was seriously--or, rather, comically--warped by her reading of heroic romances, Steele made a positive plea in _Tatler_ No. 172 for histories of "such adventures as befall persons not exalted above the common level." Books of this sort, still rare in 1710, would be of great value to "the ordinary race of men." The anonymous preface to _The Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclia_ seven years later attributed to Heliodorus's romance the value of suggesting rules "for conducting our Affairs in common Actions of Life." In 1751 when the new realism was a _fait accompli_, the author of _An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding_ declared roundly (p. 19) that in the new fiction the characters should be "taken from common Life." A good argument in favor of books about "private persons" was offered in the preface to the English translation of the Abbé Prévost's novel, _The Life And Entertaining Adventures of Mr. Cleveland, Natural Son of Oliver Cromwell_ (1741): "The history of kingdoms and empires, raises our admiration, by the solemnity ... of the images, and furnishes one of the noblest entertainments. But at the same time that it is so well suited to delight the imagination, it yet is not so apt to touch and affect as the history of private men; the reason of which seems to be, that the personages in the former, are so far above the common level, that we consider ourselves, in some measure, as aliens to them; whereas those who act in a lower sphere, are look'd upon by us as a kind of relatives, from the similitude of conditions; whence we are more intimately mov'd with whatever concerns us." A comparison of the first two paragraphs of this preface and the first four paragraphs of Johnson's _Rambler_ No. 60, if it does not discover the source of part of Johnson's paper, will at least reveal how the defender of the fictional "secret history" and a famous champion of intimate biography played into each other's hands. Johnson's appearing to follow the defender of French fiction here is all the more interesting when one recalls his alarm in _Rambler_ No. 4 over the prevailing taste for novels that exhibited, unexpurgated, "Life in its true State, diversified only by the Accidents that daily happen in the World." Indeed if it were not for Fielding himself, one might imagine from Johnson's unsteady and generally unsatisfactory criticism of prose fiction that the old neo-classical principles were completely out of date and useless.