"Thus I have attempted to trace nature in all her mazy windings, and shew life's progress through the passions, from the cradle to the grave.--The various adventures which happened to Natura, I thought, afforded a more ample field, than those of any one man I ever heard, or read of; and flatter myself, that the reader will find many instances, that may contribute to rectify his own conduct, by pointing out those things which ought to be avoided, or at least most carefully guarded against, and those which are worthy to be improved and imitated." The obvious and conventional moral ending and the shreds of romance that still adhere to the story need not blind us to its unusual features. Besides insisting upon the necessity for psychological analysis of a sort, the author here for the first time becomes a genuine novelist in the sense that her confessed purpose is to depict the actual conditions of life, not to glorify or idealize them. As Fielding was to do in "Tom Jones," Mrs. Haywood proclaims the mediocrity of her hero as his most remarkable quality. Had she been able to make him more than a lay figure distorted by various passions, she might have produced a real character. Although at times he seems to be in danger of acquiring the romantic faculty of causing every woman he meets to fall in love with him, yet the glamor of his youth is obscured by a peaceful and ordinary old age. Artificial in design and stilted in execution as the work is, it nevertheless marks Eliza Haywood's emancipation from the traditions of the romance.[3]