impression, might hazard the loss of its benefit, by passing over those pious reflections, which, if shorter, would catch their attention. "Certainly, the gentleman's objection against the persecution that Pamela suffers from Lady Davers, in respect to the relation this mad woman bears to the brother, is the least weighed of all his advices. And when he thinks she ought rather to have assumed the protection of her servants, he seems unaware of the probable consequence; where there was a puppy of quality in the case, who had, even without provocation, drawn his sword on the poor passive Pamela. Far from bearing a thought of exciting an abler resentment to the danger of a quarrel with so worthless a coxcomb, how charmingly natural, apprehensive, and generous is her silence (during the recital she makes of her sufferings) with regard to this masculine part of the insult! as also her prevention of Mrs Jewkes's less delicate bluntness, when she was beginning to complain of the whelp lord's impertinence. "If I were not afraid of a pun, I should tell the anonymous letter-writer, that he made a too tight-laced objection where he quarrels with the spanned waist of Pamela. What, in the name of unshapeliness, could he find to complain of in a beautiful girl of sixteen, who was born out of Germany, and had not yet reached ungraspable roundness!—These are wonderful sinkings from purpose, where a man is considering such mental and passionate beauties as this gentleman professed to be touched by. "But when he goes on to object against the word naughty,-as applied in the phrase, Naughty master!—it seems plain to me, that this gentleman, however laudable his intention may be on the whole, discerns not an elegance, one would have thought it impossible not to be struck by. Faulty, wicked, abominable, scandalous,-what are the angry adjectives he prefers to that sweet one?-would have carried marks of her rage, not affliction; whereas naughty contains, in one single significant petulance, twenty thousand inexpressible delicacies! It insinuates, at once, all the beautiful struggle between her contempt of his purpose, and tender regard for his person; her gratitude to himself and his family; her recollection of his superior condition. There is, in the elegant choice of this half-kind halfpeevish word, a never-enough-to-be-praised speaking picture of the conflict betwixt her disdain and her reverence. "It is the same case again in foolish thing that I am! which this nice gentleman would advise you to change into foolish that I am! He does not seem to have tasted the pretty contempt of herself, the submissive diminutive, so distant from vanity, yet allayed by the gentle reluctance in self-condemnation. "In the occasions this gentleman, in his postscript, is pleased to discover for jokes, I either find not that he has any signification at all, or causelessly, as I think, apprehends, that such coarse-tasted allusions to loose low-life idioms may be made, that not to understand what is meant by them, is both the cleanliest and prudentest way of confuting them. "And now, sir, you will easily gather how far I am from thinking it needful to change any thing in Pamela. I would not scratch such a beautiful face for the Indies! "You can hardly imagine how it charms me to hear of a second edition already; but the news of still new upon new ones, will be found no subject of wonder. As it is sure, that no family is without sisters, or brothers, or daughters, or sons, who can read, or wants fathers, or mothers, or friends, who can think; so equally certain it is, that the train to a parcel of powder does not run on with more natural tendency till it sets the whole heap in a blaze, than that Pamela, enchanting from family to family, will overspread all the hearts of the kingdom. "As to the objection of those warm friends to honesty, who are for having Pamela dismiss Mrs Jewkes, there is not one, among all these benevolent complainers, who would not discern himself to have been laudably in the wrong, were he only to be asked this plain question, Whether a step, both ill-judged and undutiful, had not been the reverse of a Pamela's character? Two or three times over Mr B. had informed her, that Mrs Jewkes and himself having been equally involved in one guilt, she must forgive or condemn both together. After this, it grew manifest duty not to treat her with marks of resentment: and, as here was a visible necessity to appear not desirous of turning her away, so, in point of mere moral regard to the bad woman herself, it was nobler to retain her, with a prospect of correcting in time her loose habit of thinking, than, by casting her off to the licen tious results of her temper, abandon her to temptations and danger, which a virtue like Pamela's could not wish her exposed to." The manner in which this admirable gentleman gives his opinion of the piece, and runs through the principal characters, is so masterly, that the readers of Pamela will be charmed by it, though they should suppose that his inimitable benevolence has overvalued the piece itself. 66 Inspired, without doubt, by some skill more than human, and comprehending, in an humble and seemingly artless narration, a force that can tear up the heart-strings, this author has prepared an enamouring philtre for the mind, which will excite such a passion for virtue, as scarce to leave it in the power of the will to neglect her. Longinus, I remember, distinguishing by what marks we may know the sublime, says, it is chiefly from an effect that will follow the reading it,—a delightfully-adhering idea, that clings fast to the memory, and from which it is difficult for a man to disengage his attention. If this is a proof of the sublime, there was never sublimity so lastingly felt as in Pamela. "Not the charmer's own prattling idea stuck so close to the heart of her master, as the incidents of her story to the thoughts of a reader. The author transports and transforms with a power more extensive than Horace requires in his poet. "Mr B. and the turns of his passions, and the softness, yet strength, of their amiable object, after having given us the most masterly image of nature that ever was painted, take possession of and dwell in the memory. "And there, too, broods the kind and the credulous Parson Williams's dove, (without serpentine mixture,) hatching pity and affection in the mind of the reader, for an honesty so sincere and unguarded. "There, too, take their places, all the lower supports of this beautiful fabric. "I am sometimes transformed into plain Goodman Andrews, and sometimes the good woman, his wife. "As for old Mr Longman, and Jonathan the butler, they are sure of me both, in their turns. "Now-and-then, I am Colbrand, the Swiss; but, as broad as I stride, in that character, I can never escape Mrs Jewkes, who often keeps me awake in the night "Till the ghost of Lady Davers, drawing open the curtains, scares the scarer of me and of Pamela. "And then I take shelter with poor penitent John, and the rest of the men and the maids; of all whom I may say, with compassionate Marcia, This fine writer adds: The youths divide their reader.'" "I am glad I made war in my last upon the notion of altering the style, for, having read it twice over since then, and to audiences where the tears were applausively eloquent, I could hardly, here and there, find a place where one word can be changed for a better. There are some, indeed, where it were possible to leave out a few without making a breach in the building; but, in short, the author has put so bewitching a mixture together, of the raised with the natural, and the soft with the strong and the eloquent, that never sentiments were finer and fuller of life; never any were uttered so sweetly. Even in what relates to the pious and frequent addresses to God, I now retract, on these two last revisals, the consent I half gave, on a former, to the anonymous writer's proposal, who advised the author to shorten those beauties. Whoever considers his Pamela with a view to find matter for censure, is in the condition of a passionate lover, who breaks in upon his mistress, without fear or wit, with intent to accuse her and quarrel;-he came to her with pique in his purpose, but his heart is too hard for his malice, and he goes away more enslaved for complaining." The following delightful story, so admirably related, will give great pleasure to the reader; and we take the liberty of inserting it, for that very reason: "What a never-to-be-satisfied length has this subject always the power of attracting me into;—and yet, before I have done, I must by your means tell the author a story, which a judge, not so skilful in nature as he is, might be in danger, perhaps, of mistaking for a trifling and silly one. I expect it should give him the clearest conviction in a case he is subject to question. "We have a lively little boy in the family, about seven years old; but, alas for him, poor child! quite unfriended, and born to no prospect. He is the son of an honest, poor soldier, by a wife, grave, unmeaning, and innocent; yet the boy-see the power of connubial simplicity is so pretty, so genteel, and gay-spirited, that we have made him and designed him our own ever since he could totter and waddle. The wanton rogue is half air; and every motion he acts by has a spring, like Pamela's, when she threw down the cardtable. All this quickness, however, is tempered by a good-natured modesty; so that the wildest of his flights are thought rather diverting than troublesome. He is an hourly foundation for laughter, from the top of the house to the parlours; and, to borrow an attribute from the Reverend Mr Peters, though without any note of his music,-plays a very good fiddle in the family. I have told you the history of this Tom-tit of a prater, because, ever since my first reading of Pamela, he puts in for a right to be one of her hearers; and, having got half her sayings by heart, talks in no other language but hers: and, what really surprises and has charmed me into a certain foretaste of her influence, he is at once become fond of his book, which before he could never be brought to attend to, that he may read Pamela, he says, without stopping. The first discovery we made of this power over so unripe and unfixed an attention, was one evening when I was reading her reflections at the pond to some company. The little rampant intruder, being kept out by the extent of the circle, had crept under my chair, and was sitting before me on the carpet, with his head almost touching the book, and his face bowing down towards the fire. He had sat for some time in this posture with a stillness that made us conclude him asleep; when, on a sudden, we heard a succession of heart-heaving sobs, which, while he strove to conceal from our notice, his little sides swelled as if they would burst with the throbbing restraint of his sorrow. I turned his innocent face to look towards me, but his eyes were quite lost in his tears, which, running down from his cheeks in free currents, had formed two sincere little fountains on that part of the carpet he hung over. All the ladies in company were ready to devour him with kisses; and he has since become doubly a favourite, and is perhaps the youngest of Pamela's converts." The same incomparable writer has favoured us with an objection, that is more material than any we have mentioned; which cannot be better stated nor answered than in his own beautiful words, viz. :— "An objection is come into my thoughts, which I should be glad the author would think proper to obviate in the front of the second edition. "There are mothers, or grandmothers, in all families of affluent fortune, who, though they may have none of Lady Davers's insolence, will be apt to feel one of her fears, that the example of a gentleman so amiable as Mr B. may be followed by the Jackies, their sons, with too blind and unreflecting a readiness. Nor does the answer of that gentleman to his sister's reproach come quite up to the point they will rest on. For though, indeed, it is true, all the world would acquit the best gentleman in it if he married such a waiting-maid as Pamela, yet there is an ill-discerning partiality in passion that will overthrow all the force of that argument, because every beloved maid will be Pamela, in a judgment obscured by her influence. "And, since the ground of this fear will seem solid, I do not know how to be easy till it is shewn,-nor ought it to be left to the author's modesty,—that they who consider his design in that light will be found but short-sighted observers. Request it of him, then, to suffer it to be told them, that not a limited, but general excitement to virtue was the first and great end of his story; and that this excitement must have been deficient, and very imperfectly offered, if he had not looked quite as low as he could for his example: because, if there had been any degree or condition more remote from the prospect than that which he had chosen to work on, that degree might have seemed out of reach of the hope which it was his generous purpose to encourage. And so he was under an evident necessity to find such a jewel in a cottage; and exposed too, as she was, to the severest distresses of fortune, with parents unable to support their own lives but from the daily hard product of labour. " Nor would it have been sufficient to have placed her thus low and distressful, if he had not also supposed her a servant, and that, too, in some elegant family; for, if she had always remained a fellow-cottager with her father, it must have carried an air of romantic improbability to account for her polite education. "If she had wanted those improvements which she found means to acquire in her service, it would have been very unlikely that she should have succeeded so well, and had destroyed one great use of the story to have allowed such uncommon felicity to the effect of mere personal beauty. And it had not been judicious, to have represented her as educated in a superior condition of life, with the proper accomplishments, before she became reduced by misfortunes, and so not a servant, but rather an orphan under hopeless distresses; because opportunities which had made it no wonder how she came to be so winningly qualified, would have lessened her merit in being so. And, besides, where had then been the purposed excitement of persons in Pamela's condition of life, by an emulation of her sweetness, humility, modesty, patience, and industry, to attain some faint hope of arriving in time within view of her happiness? And what a delightful reformation should we see in all families, where the vanity of their maids took no turn towards ambition to please, but by such innocent measures as Pamela's! "As it is clear, then, the author was under a necessity to suppose her a servant, he is not to be accountable for mistaken impressions, which the charms he has given her may happen to make on wrong heads or weak hearts, though in favour of maids the reverse of her likeness. "What is it then, they may say, that the lowness and distance of Pamela's condition, from the gentleman's who married her, proposes to teach the gay world and the fortunate? It is this:-By comparison with that infinite remoteness of her condition from the reward which her virtue procured her, one great proof is derived,-which is part of the moral of Pamela, that advantages from birth and distinction of fortune have no power at all, when considered against those from behaviour and temper of mind; because, where the last are not added, all the first will be boasted in vain,-whereas she who possesses the last, finds no want of the first in her influence. "In that light alone let the ladies of rank look at Pamela. Such an alarming reflection as that will, at the same time that it raises the hope and ambition of the humble, correct and mortify the disdain of the proud. For it will compel them to observe and acknowledge, that it is the turn of their mind, not the claims of their quality, by which, and which only, women's charms can be lasting; and that while the haughty expectations, inseparable from an elevated rank, serve but to multiply its complaints and afflictions, the condescensions of accomplished humility, attracting pity, affection, and reverence, secure an hourly increase of felicity. So that the moral meaning of Pamela's good fortune, far from tempting young gentlemen to marry such maids as are found in their families, is, by teaching maids to deserve to be mistresses, to stir up mistresses to support their distinction." VERSES, SENT TO THE BOOKSELLER, FOR THE UNKNOWN AUTHOR OF THE BEAUTIFUL NEW PIECE CALLED PAMELA. BLEST be thy powerful pen, whoe'er thou art, O! late befriended isle! had this broad blaze, Sweet Pamela! for ever blooming maid! What though thy fluttering sex might learn from thee, That merit forms a rank above degree; That pride, too conscious, falls from every claim, Shews her plain power, and charms without disguise? |