The name of his first heroine, with the essentially English throwing back of the accent added, is the same as that of one of Sidney's heroines in the _Arcadia_, which had been not long before modernised for eighteenth-century reading by a certain Mrs.
Stanley.

The not very usual form "Laurana," which is the name of a character in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of _Parismus_.
Further, he had had curious early experiences (which we know from his own meticulous revelations) of writing love-letters, when he was a mere boy, for girl-friends of his to adapt in writing to their lovers.

"His eye," he says, "had been always on the ladies," though no doubt always also in the most honourable way.

And, quite recently, the crystallisation had been precipitated by a commission from two of his bookseller (i.e.publisher) patrons--the founder of the House of Rivington and the unlucky Osborne who was knocked down by Johnson and picked up (not quite as one would wish to be) by Pope.

They asked him to prepare a series of "Familiar Letters on the useful concerns of common life." Five-and-twenty years before, he had heard in outline something like the story of _Pamela_.