Nothing can exceed the finished manner in which every personage of this splendid fiction is placed before the reader. The bashaw-father; the weak, amiable, depressed mother; the brutish brother; the sister who could never forgive the slight to her own attractions; the uncles; the hideous suitor whom her family wished Clarissa to marry; even the maid-servant -nay more, even the dead grandfather,

are your very intimate acquaintance. They remind one of those quaint old cabinet pictures, family portraits, which we see hung about near one grand painting a Correggio, perhaps, or a Raphael-delineating the purest and most perfect form of female loveliness. The portraits are out of keeping with this gem of the collection; they are too inferior even to act as foils: And so it is that we wonder how such a being as Clarissa could have been reared amid persons so thoroughly common-minded as the generality of her kinsfolk; so above that world which was all in all to them, and to rise in which was the great aim of their existence. -THOMSON, KATHERINE (GRACE WHARTON), 1862, The Literature of Society, vol. II, p. 243.

It is like a deluge of very weak and lukewarm green tea, breakfast cup after breakfast cup. After the first of the four volumes, into which the Tauchnitz edition is divided, we gave way. I was much interested with Richardson's method, and admired the particularity with which he puts his characters upon the canvas, and makes them live more in the smallest circumstances of daily life. By force of accumulated details they acquire fulness and reality. But when they come to act, when all the minutia of their internal hesitations and emotions are insisted on with wearisome prolixity, one begins to feel that what one wants in Art is something other than the infinite particulars of life. Then Richardson, to my mind, is essentially a bourgeois, his imagination mediocre, his sentiment mawkish.-SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON, 1868, Life by Brown, vol. II, p. 19.

Here is an old stationer, fat, well to do, loving money and good living, vain as a peacock, worried to death by small critics who continually gave him dyspepsia and agonies of indigestion, and only soothed by the highly spiced flattery and the spiteful reprisals on his enemies of a

circle of foolish female friends; here is, to all appearance, one of the most unfit men in the world, who, after making money till he is fifty, is led by the paltry ambition of making more, to write a work which turns out to be utterly different from his first intention, and to prove the author a great moralist, who has the most intimate acquaintance with the human heart, its passions, foibles, strength, and virtues; who can describe almost as minutely as Defoe; who can teach while he amuses, and instruct the heart in virtue while he drives away the admiration for vice; who is powerful, tragic, pathetic, and eminently original; and whose art is so great that his readers follow their enchanter through eight long volumes, heaving a sigh of regret when they lay them down; while the student of morality pronounces them to have been a benefit to the human race.-FRISWELL, JAMES HAIN, 1869, Essays on English Writers, p. 271. He was a respectable tradesman, a good printer, a comfortable soul, never owing a guinea nor transgressing a rule of morality, and yet so much a poet, that he has added at least one character (Clarissa Harlowe) to the inheritance of the world, of which Shakespeare need not have been ashamed-the most celestial thing, the highest imaginative effort of his generation. OLIPHANT, MARGARET 0. W., 1869, Historical Sketches of the Reign of George Second, ch. x.

You cannot read through twenty pages of "Clarissa" without feeling that you are mainly in the company, not of the preacher Richardson, but of real live men and women, whose movements, and sentiments, and motives are of importance to watch, and one of whom, the heroine, is a creature to inspire that deep interest always felt in any creature perfectly beautiful: her we can follow into the profoundest misfortunes, and still "in the midmost heart of grief" can "clasp a secret joy." To show, too, that Richardson felt what other artists feel, that a work of art must be mainly beautiful, the figure of Clarissa is made to occupy a place in his picture far more prominent than any one else; and a vast deal of the material which goes to make up the minor figures grouped about this central perfection, and distributed over the distance and

middle distance, a great proportion of the narrative upon which our ideas of the rest are formed, comes to us polarised through the medium of Clarissa's noble and lucid mind; so that, while we are frequently disgusted with the matter, we never lose sight of the perfection of Clarissa, whether as actor or narrator.-FORMAN, HENRY BUXTON, 1869, Samuel Richardson as Artist and Moralist, Fortnightly Review, vol. 12, p. 434.

There is no need that you should shout to make us afraid; that you should write out the lesson by itself, and in capitals, in order to distinguish it. We love art, and you have a scant amount of it; we want to be pleased, and you don't care to please us. You copy all the letters, detail the conversations, tell everything, prune nothing; your novels fill many volumes; spare us, use the scissors; be a literary man, not a registrar of archives. Do not pour out your library of documents on the high-road. Art is different from nature; the latter draws out, the first condenses. Twenty letters of twenty pages do not display a character; but one sharp word does. You are rendered heavy by your conscience, which drags you along step by step and low on the ground; you are afraid of your genius; you rein it in; you dare not use loud cries and frank words for violent moments. You flounder into emphatic and well-written phrases; you will not show nature as it is, as Shakspeare shows it, when, stung by passion as by a hot iron, it cries out, rears, and plunges over your barriers. You cannot love it, and your punishment is that you cannot see it.-TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. II, bk. iii, ch. vi, p. 169.

To me, I confess, "Clarissa Harlowe' is an unpleasant, not to say odious book.

If any book deserved the charge of "sickly sentimentality," it is this, and that it should have once been so widely popular, and thought admirably adapted to instruct young women in lessons of virtue and religion, shows a strange and perverted state of the public taste, not to say public morals.-FORSYTH, WILLIAM, 1871, The Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century, pp. 215, 216.

Unfortunately, Macaulay's stay on the Neilgherries [in 1834] coincided with the monsoon. "The rain streamed down in

floods. It was very seldom that I could see a hundred yards in front of me. During a month together I did not get two hours walking.' hours walking." He began to be bored, for the first and last time in his life: while his companions, who had not his resources, were ready to hang themselves for very dulness. There were

no books in the place except those that Macaulay had brought with him; among which, most luckily, was "Clarissa Harlowe." Aided by the rain outside, he soon talked his favourite romance into general favor. . . . An old Scotch doctor, a Jacobin and a freethinker, who could only be got to attend church by the positive orders of the governor-general, cried over the last volume until he was too ill to appear at dinner. The chief secretary-afterward, as Sir William Macnaghten, the hero and the victim of the darkest episode in our Indian history-declared that reading this copy of "Clarissa" under the inspiration of its owner's enthusiasm was nothing less than an epoch in his life. After the lapse of thirty years, when Ootacamund had long enjoyed the advantage of book-club and a circulating library, the tradition of Macaulay and his novel still lingered on with a tenacity most unusual in the ever-shifting society of an Indian station. TREVELYAN, GEORGE OTTO, 1876, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, ch. vi, 1834-38, pp. 333, 334.

Nowhere in either English fiction or poetry is there drawn a figure more beautiful, intense, and splendid than that of Clarissa.

Is probably, with all its many defects, the grandest prose tragedy ever penned.--NICOLL, HENRY, 1882, Landmarks of English Literature, pp. 211, 212.

By the universal acknowledgment of novel-readers, Clarissa is one of the most sympathetic, as she is one of the most lifelike, of all the women in literature, and Richardson has conducted her story with so much art and tact, that her very faults canonise her, and her weakness crowns the triumph of her chastity.GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, p. 248.

"Pamela" and "Clarissa" are both terribly realistic; they contain passages of horror, and are in parts profoundly pathetic, whilst "Clarissa" is desperately courageous. Fielding, with all his swagger and bounce, gold lace and strong

language, has no more of the boldness than he has of the sublimity of the historian of Clarissa Harlowe. .

"Clarissa Harlowe" has a place not merely amongst English novels, but amongst English women.-BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1892, Res Judicatæ, pp. 3, 20.

Let each to be judged after his kind: to break the glass of Richardson's bot house and let in the common air would only be to kill the tropical plants that he has grown under those fostering limitations; his characters live in a sick-room, but they would die in the open air. Any one who has once learnt to breathe in those confines must feel the beauty and charm of the sentimental growths that there luxuriate; a detached scene from "Clarissa" may jar on the critical sense, but read through, the book carries the reader clear of daily life, creates its own canons, and compels intent admiration.RALEIGH, WALTER, 1894, The English Novel, p. 160.

It has been truly said that "Clarissa Harlowe" is to "La Nouvelle Héloïse" what Rousseau's novel is to "Werther;" the three works are inseparably connected, because the bond between them is one of heredity. But while "Werther' and "Héloïse" are still read "Clarissa" is scarcely read at all, and this, beyond doubt, is the reason that, while no one thinks of disputing Goethe's indebtedness to Rousseau, it is to-day less easy to perceive the extent to which Rousseau is indebted to Richardson.-TEXTE, JOSEPH, 1895-99, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, tr. Matthews, p. 208.

If the story of Clarissa still lives, it is not by virtue of any of the subordinate characters, but by reason of the one matchless central figure, who stands unrivalled among the other inventions of her creator. And, as long as the English language is spoken or its literature read, the "divine Clarissa" will hold her own among the noblest of its ideal women, with Imogen, and Portia, and Cordelia. Torn from the proud pedestal of maidenhood, dragged in an unclean company through foul and miry ways, a sacrifice to vanity rather than to lust, she loses none of her charm or potency. For through her there speaks the authentic voice of the best women of all ages, who refuse to

disassociate love and respect from the most sacred of human relationships, or to subject themselves to the humiliation of a union unsanctioned by these motives.THOMSON, CLARA LINKLATER, 1900, Samuel Richardson, A Biographical and Critical Study, p. 207.

SIR CHARLES GRANDISON

1754

Will you permit me to take this opportunity, in sending a letter to Dr. Young, to address myself to you? It is very long ago that I wished to do it. Having finished your "Clarissa" (oh, the heavenly book!) I could have prayed you to write. the history of a manly Clarissa, but I had not courage enough at that time. I should have it no more to-day, as this is only my first English letter-but I have it! It may be because I am now Klopstock's wife (I believe you know my husband by Mr. Honorst), and then I was only the single young girl. You have since written the manly Clarissa without my prayer. Oh, you have done it to the great joy and thanks of all your happy readers! Now you can write no more, you must write the history of an angel.KLOPSTOCK, MADAME FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB, 1757, Letter to Richardson, Nov. 29.

Richardson has sent me his "History of Sir Charles Grandison," in four volumes octavo, which amuses me. It is too long, and there is too much mere talk in it. Whenever he goes ultra crepidam, into high life, he grossly mistakes the modes; but, to do him justice, he never mistakes nature, and he has surely great knowledge and skill both in painting and in interesting the heart. -CHESTERFIELD, PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE LORD, 1753, Letter to David Mallett, Nov. 5.

I have now read over Richardson-he sinks horribly in his third volume (he does so in his story of Clarissa). When he talks of Italy, it is plain he is no better acquainted with it than he is with the kingdom of Mancomugi. He might have made his Sir Charles's amour with Clementina begin in a convent, where the pensioners sometimes take great liberties; but that such familiarity should be permitted in her father's house, is as repugnant to custom, as it would be in London for a young lady of quality to dance on the ropes at Bartholomew fair: Neither does his hero behave to her in a manner

suitable to his nice notions. It was impossible a discerning man should not see her passion early enough to check it, if he had really designed it. His conduct

puts me in mind of some ladies I have known, who could never find out a man to be in love with them, let him do or say what he would, till he made a direct attempt, and then they were so surprised, I warrant you!-MONTAGU, LADY MARY WORTLEY, 1755, Letter to the Countess of Bute, Oct. 20.

Do you never read now? I am a little piqued that you say nothing of Sir Charles Grandison; if you have not read it yet, read it for my sake. Perhaps Clarissa does not encourage you; but in my opinion it is much superior to Clarissa.GIBBON, EDWARD, 1756, Letter to Mrs. Porten, Miscellaneous Works, p. 227.

A masterpiece of the most healthy philosophy. . . . Antiquity, can show nothing more exquisite.- MARMONTEL, JEAN FRANÇOIS, 1758, Mercure de France, August.

You admire Richardson, monsieur le marquis; how much greater would be your admiration, if, like me, you were in a position to compare the pictures of this great artist with nature; to see how natural his situations are, however seemingly romantic, and how true his portraits, for all their apparent exaggeration!-RousSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES, 1767, Letter to Marquis de Mirabeau.

I don't like those long and intolerable novels "Pamela" and "Clarissa." They have been successful because they excite the reader's curiosity even amidst a medley of trifles; but if the author had been imprudent enough to inform us at the very beginning that "Clarissa" and "Pamela" were in love with their persecutors, everything would have been spoiled, and the reader would have thrown the book aside.-VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET, 1767, Letter, May 16. Who will not one of them submit To be Sir Charles' devoted slave; And, blindlings still, will not admit All the Dictator's teachings brave. But sneer and jeer, and run away, And hear no more he has to say. -GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG, 1768, Epistle to Frederika Oeser; Grimm's Life of Goethe, tr. Adams, p. 152.

M. de Voltaire, in his numerous writings,

which I have read and re-read, has avoided, so far as I know, all mention of Richardson, whether favourable or otherwise, though he has treated of every other writer, however obscure. It is impossible that the author of "Nanine" should fail to appreciate "Pamela;" he has certainly read "Clarissa" and "Grandison," poems to which antiquity can produce no worthy rival. He must know that these masterpieces of feeling, truth, and moral teaching have found readers of both sexes, in every country and of every age. I suppose that, since M. de Voltaire's manner of writing is diametrically opposed to Richardson's, the silence he has preserved in regard to this author of genius is founded on principle.-MERCIER, SÉBASTIEN, 1773, Essai sur l'art dramatique, p. 326.

Clarissa! with Heaven itself radiant in your saintly beauty; free, in all your pain, alike from hatred and from bitterness, suffering without a groan, and perishing without a murmur; beloved Clementina! pure, and heavenly soul, who, amidst the harsh treatment of an unjust household, never lost your innocence with the loss of your reason; your eyes, bright souls, hold me with their charm; your sweet likeness hastens to fill my fairest dreams!— CHENIER, MARIE-ANDRÉ, 1794? Elégie, xiv.

Throughout the entire composition, the author exhibits great powers of mind; but especially in describing the agitations caused by the passion of love in the bosom of the amiable and enthusiastic Clementina; whose madness is so finely drawn, that Doctor Warton thought it superior to that of Orestes in Euripides; and heightened by more exquisite touches of nature even than that of Shakspeare's Lear. Amongst other beauties in this work may be counted, the truth and delicacy with which the author has sketched the numlove of Emily Jervois, the imposing effect berless portraits it contains, the innocent with which Sir Charles is introduced, and the great art shewn in keeping him constantly in view.-MANGIN, EDWARD, 1810, ed., The Works of Samuel Richardson, Sketch, vol. I, p. xxii.

Sir Charles Grandison, whom I look upon as the prince of coxcombs; and so much the more impertinent as he is a moral one. His character appears to me "ugly all over with affectation. There is not a

single thing that Sir Charles Grandison does or says all through the book from liking to any person or object but himself, and with a view to answer to a certain standard of perfection for which he pragmatically sets up. He is always thinking of himself, and trying to show that he is the wisest, happiest, and most virtuous person in the whole world. He is (or would be thought) a code of Christian ethics: a compilation and abstract of all gentlemanly accomplishments. There is nothing I conceive, that excites so little sympathy as this inordinate egotism; or so much disgust as this everlasting selfcomplacency. Yet his self-admiration, brought forward on every occasion as the incentive to every action and reflected from all around him, is the burden and pivot of the story.-HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1830? Men and Manners.

But as my friend, Sir Charles Grandison, has no other sin to answer for than that of being very long, very tedious, very oldfashioned, and a prig, I cannot help confessing that, in spite of these faults, and perhaps because of them, I think there are worse books printed, now-a-days and hailed with delight among critics feminine, than the seven volumes that gave such infinite delight to the beauties of the court of George the Second. MITFORD, MARY RUSSELL, 1851, Recollections of a Literary Life, p. 412.

Of fiction, read Sir Charles Grandison.

-RUSKIN, JOHN, 1857, The Elements of Drawing, Appendix.

Other works, of a very different character, fell into my hands about this time. Sir Charles Grandison, despite its stately formality, did me good. I think its tone I think its tone of old-fashioned, homely chivalry has a healthy influence on young people. OWEN, ROBERT DALE, 1873, A Chapter of Autobiography, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 31, p. 450.

In this novel is one of the most powerful of all our author's delineations-the madness of Clementina. Shakspeare himself has scarcely drawn a more affecting or harrowing picture of high-souled suffering and blighting calamity. The same accumulation of details as in "Clarissa,' all tending to heighten the effect and produce the catastrophe, hurry on the reader with breathless anxiety, till he has learned

the last sad event, and is plunged in unavailing grief. This is no exaggerated account of the sensations produced by Richardson's pathetic scenes. He is one of the most powerful and tragic of novelists; and that he is so, in spite of much tediousness of description, much repetition and prolixity of narrative, is the best testimony to his art and genius.-CHAMBERS, ROBERT, 1876, Cyclopædia of English Literature, ed. Carruthers.

"Sir Charles Grandison," published, in 1753, was Richardson's most celebrated romance. The hero is a huge compendium of noble qualities, in whose possible existence every one firmly believed. My uncle Jacob used to tell me of having, as a child, seen his mother absorbed in reading "Sir Charles Grandison." And such reading was no trifling matter; it required much time and thought. These romances came like great events into our life, which at that time had little to do with political agitations. The translations spread in every direction among us. The marvellously broad and plain treatment of universally-useful and well-understood moral problems made a thorough knowledge of these romances almost a duty as well as an enjoyment. There seemed to be no more agreeable way of appropriating to oneself a life experience of the noblest kind than this convenient and most innocent one. Romances of this kind proved the best form in which to comprise all that training. They came in as a supplement might be conducive to genuine moral when the sermon from the pulpit had not fulfilled its task; and for this reason a great number of the romance writers belonged to the clerical profession.--GRIMM, HERMAN, 1877-80, The Life and Times of Goethe, tr. Adams, p. 152.

It would be allowing too much, however, to the third of Richardson's romances, "Sir Charles Grandison," to say that it reaches the same level of ideal portraiture as "Clarissa Harlowe." In delineating, at the request of his friends, as he tells us, "the man of true honour," in the person of this irreproachable baronet, Richardson had no such dramatic contrast to inspire him as in his second and greatest romance. Sir Hargrave Pollexfen is but a commonplace and vulgar foil to the virtues of the hero, and there is no thread of pathos or of tragedy running through