There are, however, more ways than one in which _corpora vilia_ are good for experiment and evidence: and we may find useful indications in the mere bookmaking of the time.

Lowndes, the fortunate publisher of _Evelina_, some dozen years before that windfall came, had issued, or reissued, a collection called _The Novelist_ and professedly containing _The select novels of Dr.Croxall_ [the ingenious author of _The Fair Circassian_ and the part destroyer of Hereford Cathedral] _and other Polite Tales_.

The book is an unblushing if not an actually piratical compilation; sweeping together, with translations and adaptations published by Croxall himself at various times in the second quarter of the century and probably earlier, most of the short stories from the _Spectator_ class of periodical which had appeared during the past two-thirds of a century.
Most of the rest are obvious (and very badly done) translations from the French and even from Cervantes' _Exemplary Novels_; seasoned with personal and other anecdotes, so that the whole number of separate articles may exceed four-score.

Of these a few are interesting attempts at the historical novel or novelette--short sketches of Mary Queen of Scots (very sympathetic and evidently French in origin from the phrase "a _temple_ which was formerly a church"), Jane Shore (an exquisitely absurd piece of eighteenth-century middle-class modernising and moralising), Essex, Buckingham, and other likely figures.

There are cuts by the "Van-somethings and Back-somethings" of the time: and the whole, though not worthy of anything better than the "fourpenny box," is an evident symptom of popular taste.