Clergyman’s Almanac, 1815

“The indiscriminate reading of novels and romances is to young females of the most dangerous tendency. It agitates their fancy to delirium of pleasure never to be realized and opens to their view the Elysium fields which exist only in the imagination, fields which involve them in wretchedness and inconsolable sorrow. The most profligate villain, bent on the infernal purpose of seducing a woman, could not wish a symptom more favorable to his purpose than a strong imagination inflamed with the rhapsodies of artful and corrupting novels.”