several months. What the fate of Clarissa would be, whether Grandison would marry Harriet Byron or Clementina-were problems for the solution of which Richardson's earliest admirers had to wait patiently, bombarding the author meanwhile with hysterical suggestions for endings agreeable to their taste and fancy.

All these things, the fresh mind, the unjaded appetite, the unravelled mystery,—are denied the modern reader, who can (to use Cibber's figure) read to the finish without drawing bit; and probably sets out on his journey with a traditional knowledge of the course of the fable which deprives it of the attraction of the unexpected. On the other hand, he has advantages which his predecessor never enjoyed. He knows what the first reader could not know: that the little printer of Salisbury Court was to become an English classic; that he founded the novel of sentiment and analysis; that he influenced a whole army of writers in this country and on the Continent, and that, although his style was slipshod and his experience of life restricted, he possessed a faculty which has never yet been rivalled, for sounding the recesses of the human, and especially of the female, heart. Probably no students will now read him, with a view, as he fondly hoped, to regulate their course of action in the "more important concerns of life"; they may not even read him for his story; but they will read him for his genius, because if they begin him, he will gradually subjugate them and compel them to go on. And the outcome of their enterprise will be the discovery that, with all his defects of education, of narrow environment, of surplusage, of bad taste, he possessed the supreme gift of minute imagination in a most exceptional and extraordinary degree, and on this account alone must be numbered among the greatest names in English literature.

It is fortunate that the present edition has the benefit of a Life and Prefaces from the practised pen of Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale University, who has already acquired distinction, both in England and America, by his studies of this particular subject and period.

AUSTIN DOBSON.

EALING, 1902.