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194 young heroine, Pamela. "The king hath, as it were, unhallowed and unchristened the very duty of prayer itself," wrote Milton mercilessly. "Who would have imagined so little fear in him of the true all-seeing deity, so little care of truth in his last words, or honor to himself or to his friends, as, immediately before his death, to pop into the hand of that grave bishop who attended him, for a special relique of his saintly exercises, a prayer stolen word by word from the mouth of a heathen woman praying to a heathen god."

But not even the mighty voice of Milton could check the resistless progress of romantic fiction. Not even dominant Puritanism could stamp it ruthlessly down. When "Pilgrim's Progress," the great pioneer of religious novels, was given to the world, England read it with devout delight; but she read too, with admirable inconsistency, those endless tales, those "romances de longue haleine," which crossed the channel from France, and replaced the less decorous Italian stories so popular in the preceding century. Some of these prolix and ponderous volumes, as relentless in dullness as in length, held their own stoutly for centuries,