On the technical development of the modern novel the _roman à clef_ can hardly have exercised a strong influence. Nor can the lampoons in Mrs. Haywood's anthologies of scandal be valued highly as attempts to characterize. To draw a portrait from the life is not to create a character, still less when the lines are distorted by satire. But the caricaturing of fine ladies and gentlemen cannot have been without effect as a corrective to the glittering atmosphere of courtly life that still permeated the pages of the short, debased romances. The characters of the scandal novels were still princes and courtiers, but their exploits were more licentious than the lowest pothouse amours of picaros and their doxies. The chivalrous conventions of the heroic romances had degenerated into the formalities of gallantry, the exalted modesty of romantic heroines had sunk into a fearful regard for shaky reputations, and the picture of genteel life was filled with scenes of fraud, violence, and vice. As the writers of anti-romances in the previous century had found a delicately malicious pleasure in exhibiting characters drawn from humble and rustic life performing the ceremonies and professing the sentiments of a good breeding foreign to their social position, so the scandal-mongering authors like Mrs. Haywood helped to make apparent the hollowness of the aristocratic conventions even as practiced by the aristocracy and the incongruity of applying exalted ideals derived from an outworn system of chivalry to everyday ladies and gentleman of the Georgian age. Undoubtedly the writers of _romans à clef_ did not bargain for this effect, for they clung to their princes and court ladies till the last, leaving to more able pens the task of making heroes and heroines out of cobblers and kitchen wenches. But in representing people of quality as the "vilest and silliest part of the nation" Mrs. Haywood and her ilk prepared their readers to welcome characters drawn from their own station in society, and paved the way for that "confounding of all ranks and making a jest of order," which, though deplored by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,[1] was nevertheless a condition of progress toward realism.