LIVES OP THE NOVELISTS. RICHARDSON. THE life of this excellent man and ingenious author has been written, with equal spirit and candour, by Mrs Barbauld, a name long dear to elegant literature, and is prefixed to her publication of the author's Correspondence, published by Phillips, in six volumes, in 1804. The leading circumstances of these simple annals are necessarily extracted from that performance, to which the present editor has no means of adding any thing of consequence. SAMUEL RICHARDSON was born in Derbyshire, in the year 1689. His father was one of many sons, sprung from a family of middling note, which had been so far reduced, that the children were brought up to mechanical trades. VOL. II. His mother was also decently descended, but an orphan, left such in infancy, by the death of her father and mother, cut off, within half an hour of each other, by the great pestilence, in 1663. Her name is not mentioned. His father was a joiner, and connected, by employment, with the unhappy Duke of Monmouth, after whose execution he retired to Shrewsbury, apprehensive, perhaps, of a fate similar to that of College, his brother in trade, and well known, in those times, by the title of the Protestant Joiner. Having sustained severe losses in trade, the elder Richardson was unable to give his son Samuel more than a very ordinary education; and our author, who was to rise so high in one department of literature, was left unacquainted with any language excepting his own. Under all these disadvantages, and perhaps in some degree owing to their existence, young Richardson very early followed, with a singular bias, the course which was most likely to render his name immortal. We give his own words, for they cannot be amended: « I recollect that I was early noted for having invention. I was not fond of play as other boys; my school-fellows used to call me Serious and Gravity, and five of them particularly delighted to single me out, either for a walk, or at their father's houses, or at mine, to tell them stories, as they phrased it. Some I told them from my reading, as true, others from my head, as mere invention, of which they would be most fond, and often were affected by them. One of them particularly, I remember, was for -putting me to write a history, as he called it, on the model of Tommy Pots. I now forget what it was, only that it was of a servant-man preferred by a young lady (for his goodness) to a lord, who was a libertine. All my stories carried with them, I am bold to say, a useful moral.»1 But young Richardson found a still more congenial body of listeners among the female sex. An old lady, indeed, seems to have resented an admonitory letter, in which the future teacher of morals contrasted her pretensions to religion with her habitual indulgence in slander and backbiting; but with the young and sentimental his reception was more gracious. « As a bashful, and not forward boy," he says, << I was an early favourite with all the young women of taste and reading in the neighbourhood. Half a dozen of them, when met to work with their needles, used, when they got a book they liked, and thought I should, to borrow me to read to them; their mothers sometimes with them, and both mothers and daughters used to be pleased with the observations they put me upon making. I was not Life of Richardson, vol. i. pp. 36, 37. more than thirteen, when three of these young women, unknown to each other, having an high opinion of my taciturnity, revealed to me their love secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies to write after, or correct, for answers to their lovers' letters; nor did any one of them ever know that I was the secretary to the others. I have been directed to chide, and even repulse, when an offence was either given or taken, at the very time that the heart of the chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing with esteem and affection, and the fair repulser dreading to be taken at her word, directing this word, or that expression to be softened or changed. One, highly gratified with her lover's fervour and vows of everlasting love, has said, when I have asked her direction, I cannot tell you what to write, but (her heart on her lips) you cannot write too kindly. All her fear was only, that she should incur slight for her kindness. » His father had nourished some ambitious views of dedicating young Richardson to the ministry, but as his circumstances denied him the means of giving him necessary education, Samuel was destined to that profession most nearly connected with literature, and was bound apprentice to Mr John Wilde, of Stationers' Hall, in the year 1706. Industrious, Life of Richardson, vol. i. pp. 39, 40. as well as intelligent, regulated in his habits, and diverted by no headstrong passion from the strictest course of duty, Richardson made rapid progress in his employment as a printer. « I served," he says, » a diligent seven years to it; to a master who grudged every hour to me that tended not to his profit, even of those times of leisure and diversion, which the refractoriness of my fellow-servants obliged him to allow them, and were usually allowed by other masters to their apprentices. I stole from the hours of rest and relaxation, my reading times for improvement of my mind: and being engaged in a correspondence with a gentleman, greatly my superior in degree, and of ample fortune, who, had he lived, intended high things for me, those were all the opportunities I had in my apprenticeship to carry it on. But this little incident I may mention; I took care that even my candle was of my own purchasing, that I might not, in the most trifling instance, make my master a sufferer (and who used to call me the pillar of his house,) and not to disable myself by watching or sitting up, to perform my duty to him in the day time.>>1 The correspondence betwixt Richardson and the gentleman who had so well selected an object of patronage, was voluminous; but 'Life of Richardson, vol. i. pp. 41, 42. |