He is a late instance--he was born in 1729 and so was only a few years younger than Smollett himself--of the writers who had, for all but half a century after Richardson's appearance, accumulated patterns and examples of the novel in all sorts of forms, hardly one of which lacked numerous and almost innumerable imitators and followers. By these later years of the century the famous "Minerva Press" and many others issued deluges of novel-work which were eagerly absorbed by readers. "Absorbed" in more senses than one: for the institution of circulating libraries, while it facilitated reading, naturally tended towards the destruction of the actual volumes read. Novels were rarely produced in a very careful or sumptuous fashion, and good copies of those that were in any way popular are now rather hard to obtain: while even in the British Museum it will frequently be found that only the later editions are represented. We shall finish this chapter with some instances, taken not quite at random, of the work of the last decades of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, winding up with more general notice of two remarkable writers who represent--though at least one of them lived far later--the period before Scott, and who also, as it happens, represent the contrast of novel and romance in a fashion unusually striking. The description, as some readers will have anticipated, refers to Miss Edgeworth and to Maturin. But the smaller fry must be taken first. It is not uninteresting to compare two such books as Mrs. Bennett's _Anna_ and Mrs. Opie's _Adeline Mowbray_. Published at twenty years' distance (1785 and 1804) they show the rapid growth of the novel, even during a time when nothing of the first class appeared. _Anna, or the Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress, interspersed with Anecdotes of a Nabob_, is a kind of bad imitation of Miss Burney, with a catchpenny "interspersion" to suit the day. _Adeline Mowbray_, written with more talent, chimes in by infusing one of the tones of _its_ day--Godwinian theories of life. The space between was the palmy time of that now almost legendary "Minerva Press" which, as has been said, flooded the ever-absorbent market with stuff of which _The Libertine_, masterpiece of Mrs. Byrne, _alias_ Charlotte Dacre, _alias_ "Rosa Matilda," is perhaps best worth singling out from its companions, _Hours of Solitude, The Nun of St. Omers, Zofloya_, etc., because it specially shocked the censor of the style who will be mentioned presently. It is pure (or not-pure) rubbish. Angelo (the libertine) seduces the angelic Gabrielle de Montmorency, who follows him to Italy in male attire, saves him from the wicked courtesan Oriana and her bravo Fiorenz_a_ (_sic_), is married by him, but made miserable, and dies. He continues his misbehaviour to their children, and finally blows his brains out. "Bah! it is bosh!" as the Master observes of something else.