"Yeild [_sic_] Heywood yeild, yeild all whose tender Strains, Inspire the Dreams of Maids and lovesick Swains; Who taint the unripen'd Girl with amorous Fire, And hint the first faint Dawnings of Desire: Wing each Love-Atom, that in Embryo lies, And teach young Parthenissa's Breasts to rise. A new Elisa writes," etc., etc. CHAPTER III THE DUNCAN CAMPBELL PAMPHLETS Only once did Eliza Haywood compete with Defoe upon the same ground. Both novelists were alive to the value of sensational matter, but as we have seen, appealed to the reader's emotional nature from different sides. Defoe with his strong interest in practical life looked for stirring incidents, for strange and surprising adventures on land and sea, for unusual or uncanny occurrences; whereas Mrs. Haywood, less a journalist than a romancer, rested her claim to public favor upon the secure basis of the tender passions. In the books exploiting the deaf and dumb prophet Duncan Campbell, whose fame, once illustrated by notices in the "Tatler" and "Spectator,"[1] was becoming a little dimmed by 1720, each writer chose the kind of material that the natural propensity and previous experience of each had trained him or her to use with the greatest success. Accordingly the "History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell, a gentleman who, though deaf and dumb, writes down any stranger's name at first sight, with their future contingencies of fortune: Now living in Exeter Court, over against the Savoy in the Strand," published by Curll on 30 April, 1720, and written largely by Defoe, devoted only four chapters directly to the narrative of the conjuror's life, while four chapters and the Appendix were given over to disquisitions upon the method of teaching deaf and dumb persons to read and write; upon the perception of demons, genii, or familiar spirits; upon the second sight; upon magic in all its branches; and upon the laws against false diviners and soothsayers. Beside showing the keenness of his interest in the supernatural, the author deliberately avoided any occasion for talking gossip or for indulging "persons of airy tempers" with sentimental love-tales. "Instead of making them a bill of fare out of patchwork romances and polluting scandal," reads the preface signed by Duncan Campbell, "the good old gentleman who wrote the adventures of my life has made it his business to treat them with a great variety of entertaining passages which always terminate in morals that tend to the edification of all readers, of whatsoever sex, age, or profession." Those who came to consult the seer on affairs of the heart, therefore, received only the scantiest mention from his biographer, and never were the languishing and sighing of Mr. Campbell's devotees described with any romantic glamor. On the contrary, Defoe portrayed in terse and homely phrases the follies and affectations of the dumb man's fair clients. The young blooming beauty who found little Duncan "wallowing in