About the middle of the eighteenth century, some interesting novels were written by women, but their fame was so overshadowed by the early masters of English fiction, who were then writing, that they have been almost forgotten. For in 1740 _Pamela_ was published, the first novel of Samuel Richardson; in 1771, _Humphry Clinker_ appeared, the last novel of Tobias Smollett; and during the thirty-one years between these two dates all the books of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett were given to the world, and determined the nature of the English novel. The plot of most of their fifteen realistic novels is practically the same. The hero falls in love with a beautiful young lady, not over seventeen, and there is a conflict between lust and chastity. The hero, balked of his prey, travels up and down the world, where he meets with a series of adventures, all very much alike, and all bearing very little on the main plot. At last fate leads the dashing hero to the church door, where he confers a ring on the fair heroine, a paltry piece of gold, the only reward for her fidelity, with the hero thrown in, much the worse for wear, and the curtain falls with the sound of the wedding bells in the distance. The range of these novels is narrow. They describe a world in which the chief occupation is eating, drinking, swearing, gambling, and fighting. Their chief artistic excellence is the strength and vigour with which these low scenes are described. Sidney Lanier says of them: "They play upon life as upon a violin without a bridge, in the deliberate endeavour to get the most depressing tones possible from the instrument." And Taine, who could hardly endure any of them, writes of Fielding what he implies of the others: "One thing is wanted in your strongly-built folks--refinement; the delicate dreams, enthusiastic elevation, and trembling delicacy exist in nature equally with coarse vigour, noisy hilarity, and frank kindness." The women who essayed the art of fiction during these years did not have so firm a grasp of the pen as their male contemporaries, and they have added no portraits to the gallery of fiction; but they saw and recorded many interesting scenes of British life which quite escaped the quick-sighted Fielding, or Sterne with the microscopic eyes.