The little amatory tales which formed Mrs. Haywood's chief stock in trade when she first set up for a writer of fiction, inherited many of the characteristics of the long-winded French romances. Though some were told with as much directness as any of the intercalated narratives in "Clélie" or "Cléopâtre," others permitted the inclusion of numerous "little histories" only loosely connected with the main plot. Letters burning with love or jealousy were inserted upon the slightest provocation, and indeed remained an important component of Eliza Haywood's writing, whether the ostensible form was romance, essay, or novel. Scraps of poetry, too, were sometimes used to ornament her earliest effusions, but the other miscellaneous features of the romances--lists of maxims, oratory, moral discourses, and conversations --were discarded from the first. The language of these short romances, while generally more easy and often more colloquial than the absurd extravagances of the translators of heroic romances and their imitators, still smacked too frequently of shady groves and purling streams to be natural. Many conventional themes of love or jealousy, together with such stock types as the amorous Oriental potentate, the lover disguised as a slave, the female page, the heroine of excessive delicacy, the languishing beauty, the ravishing sea-captain, and the convenient pirate persisted in the pages of Mrs. Barker, Mrs. Haywood, and Mrs. Aubin. As in the interminable tomes of Scudéry, love and honor supplied the place of life and manners in the tales of her female successors, and though in some respects their stories were nearer the standard of real conduct, new novel on the whole was but old romance writ small.