The writings of Charles Brockden Brown have evoked a number of curious judgments: Shelley's admiration of Constantia Dudley, for instance, and Margaret Fuller's intimation that she herself might have been a worthy companion for so intellectual and sensitive a man as Brown. Anyone deceived by Brown's fiction is in distinguished company certainly, for even the fastidious Hawthorne and the critical Poe thought well of his work. Whether all the extravagances he evokes redound to his credit is perhaps a matter of opinion, but it is hardly to his credit as a novelist that his fiction should not be recognized as such. Recently, however, what is clearly his attempt to write an epistolary novel of a grand passion, in the manner of Werther and La Nouvelle Héloise, has been misread and offered as providing biographical data.