Love in Excess (1719/1720), by Eliza Haywood, was one of the four best-selling novels in England during the first half of the eighteenth-century:

A while their lips were cemented! rivetted together with kisses, such kisses! as collecting every sence in one, exhale the very soul, and mingle spirits! Breathless with bliss, then would they pause and gaze, then joyn again, with ardour still encreasing, and looks, and sighs, and straining grasps were all the eloquence that either could make use of.

Possible reader responses:

1. Hee-hee!
2. No wonder the emerging genre of the novel was viewed with such suspicion at this time.