Page:The Adventures of David Simple (1904).djvu/11

 did I so much wish for it as in this daring attempt of mentioning Clarissa; but when I read of her, I am all sensation: my heart glows—I am overwhelmed—my only vent is tears." In middle age she went to Bath, to take the waters, and ultimately settled down there. A few casual references are extant of her life in that city of fashion, gaiety and culture, at the time when Beau Nash was "King," and Ralph Allen of Prior Park was playing Maecenas to many an author in distress. Allen is said to have allowed her an annuity of a hundred pounds. She died at Bath in 1768, and a monument was erected to her in the Abbey Church, bearing an inaccurate inscription and the following verses by Dr. John Hoadley—

Her unaffected manners, candid mind, Her heart benevolent, and soul resign'd; Were more her praise than all she knew or thought, Though Athens' wisdom to her sex she taught.

It would be unfair to criticize David Simple on its literary merits alone, without taking into account its historical position as an early novel. It was published a year before Tom Jones. Richardson had written Pamela, but not Clarissa Harlowe. The Vicar of Wakefield was still a long way off in the future, and so were the novels of Fanny Burney. Sterne's Tristram Shandy was not published till 1759, fifteen years ahead; and four years were to elapse before Smollett's first book, Roderick Random, was to see the light. Few books, in truth, that could with any sense of propriety be called novels, were in existence at the time when Miss Fielding sat down to write. Certainly, the masterpieces of Swift and Defoe were not novels in our sense of the word. Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley Papers had far more of the stuff of which the novel of the future was to be made. In Addison there is the delineation of real