she discovers that she has given him her heart. In a passage in which Richardson shows his delicacy of insight, she takes herself to task :

Therefore will I not acquit thee yet, oh credulous, fluttering, throbbing mischief! that art so ready to believe what thou wishest! And I charge thee to keep better guard than thou hast lately done, and lead me not to follow too implicitly thy flattering and desirable impulses. Thus foolishly dialogued I with my own heart; and yet all this time, this heart was Pamela.

She was not put to the test of a change from violence to tenderness. Her prudence reinforced her virtue, and, despairing of winning her by other means, Mr. B. offers her marriage. Without exacting any penitence from her would-be seducer, she accepts him with obsequious gratitude and a humility which is almost servile. At the wedding, when the bridegroom had finished the sentences "with this ring I thee wed, etc.," she drops a curtsey and says: "Thank you, sir."

London went mad over Pamela." Not to have read the book was at least as great a want of good breeding as "not to have seen the French and Italian dancers." Society paid its tribute to the novelty of the experiment. Yet, if Richardson had written nothing more, prudent Pamela's most enduring monument might have been Fielding's parody. The continuation of the story in which Pamela reclaims her libertine husband scarcely deserves mention. But in 1748 Richardson produced his masterpiece.

In all the circumstances," Clarissa Harlowe " is one of the marvels of our literature. The advance which Richardson had made in knowledge of human nature is striking. The publication of his book proceeded in the same leisurely fashion as the story itself progressed. Four volumes appeared in 1747, and the remaining four before the end of 1748. The plot is simple. To avoid a hateful marriage, Clarissa escapes from home and trusts to the honourable protection of Lovelace to convey her to a place of safety. He takes her to a house of ill fame where he eventually drugs and violates her. She rejects his subsequent offer of marriage, pines away, and dies. As the story developed, Richardson was implored by his friends to give it a happy ending. To the same effect appeals reached him from strangers in different parts of the country. To all entreaties he turned a deaf ear.

! On the conclusion of his tragic story he was rightly inexorable. He knew that marriage with her betrayer could never restore Clarissa's self-respect, and that the only cure for her sense of the shame of her humiliation was death. The central feature of the book is disgusting: the detail is meticulous; the progress of the story leisurely to the point of exasperation. Perhaps also, at first sight, the figure of Clarissa, in her pale-coloured paduasoy, her Brussels lace cap, her flowered cuffs and apron, may seem to modern eyes faded and old-fashioned. Yet, as the patient, deliberate touches gradually throw upon the canvas the picture of the tender, maidenly girl, whose heart had hardly begun to unfold with the spring-like warmth of an unacknowledged fancy, before it was numbed, withered and frozen to death, the conviction slowly grows that Clarissa is no conventional heroine but a high imaginative effort. The pathos of the final scene in its elaboration misses the effectiveness of bare simplicity. But it is true. It even survives the shock of Clarissa's purchase of her coffin and her use of it as a writing-table; it remains tragic to the close.

As

The extreme length of the story disguises the massiveness of its construction. No detail is omitted, but nothing is irrelevant; everything fits into its place in the development of the climax. Intensity of purpose is one secret of Richardson's power. The deliberation of his advance heightens the impression of unrelenting fate. Clarissa's weakness and irresolution play into its hands. All the circumstances converge on the same end. the clouds gather, mass and concentrate, the cumulative effect is striking. It is strengthened by contrast with the restraint, again against the advice of his critics, which Richardson exercised in dealing with the death of Lovelace. He elaborates no agonies of remorse, no tortures of awakened conscience. Challenged to a duel by Clarissa's cousin, Lovelace dies by the hand of her avenger.

In the character of Lovelace, Richardson attempted a harder task than that of painting paragons like Clarissa or Sir Charles Grandison. He had to draw the portrait of a man who is half angel, half devil. He succeeds in making Lovelace clever, witty, audacious, full of vitality, a charming companion, likely to attract a young girl's fancy. But the vicious side is exaggerated. Lovelace is such a villain as a woman might imagine who is ignorant of men and inexperienced in vice. Here is a man who has thought over

marriage only to reject the idea. He is not swept off his feet by passion, for in Richardson's scheme of morality, passion found no place. He has not even the zest of the hunter for the pursuit and capture. He deliberately plans the ruin of the girl for a cold-blooded motive, and, to strain belief to the utmost, he discloses his scheme, discusses its progress, and announces its success in a series of letters to another man. Psychologically possible, he is certainly incredible.

Whether Thomas Carlyle ever read "Sir Charles Grandison " may be doubted. But when he called Lafayette a "GrandisonCromwell," he knew that the name of Sir Charles Grandison was proverbial for the typical fine gentleman of the eighteenth century. The novel was published in seven volumes between November, 1753 and March, 1754. Some of his lady friends reproached Richardson with painting men only as profiigates; he, and only he, could give them an ideal hero. Others among the younger women acknowledged their liking for Lovelace and doubted whether they could love a tame man," or one to whom they had nothing to forgive. Worse than all, rumours reached him that "Tom Jones" was the hero of many girls, and that young men had their " Sophias," and had even given the name to a “ Dutch mastiff puppy." Piqued in his vanity as a moralist, and in his jealousy as an author, he wrote "Sir Charles Grandison " to give the world "the example of a man acting uniformly well through a variety of trying scenes, because all his actions are regulated by one steady principle."

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Sir Charles Grandison possesses every gift of fortune, as well as the love of three beautiful and wealthy ladies, whose rhapsodies are supplemented by a chorus of praise from a variety of sources. Even Sir Charles himself swells the triumphal music by reporting, with becoming indifference, the compliments which he receives. Young, rich, well-born, perfect in figure, dress, deportment and accomplishments, a consummate master of the small sword, he is honourable and courageous. He does the right thing with a self-conscious air, and says it, not without a touch of pomposity. He portions his sisters handsomely, buries his father with dignity, behaves generously to the dead man's mistress and her children, reclaims a reprobate uncle by providing him a wife, refuses to fight duels or dock the tails of his horses. Prig though he is, he is likeable rather than insufferable. Naturally, he does no wooing;

he has only to toss his handkerchief to one or other of his adorers. His royal progress is made so smooth that his true character is never tested by misfortune.

Sir Charles is brought on the stage with an appropriate flourish of trumpets. In an excellent scene he rescues Harriet Byron from her abductor. Harriet at once loses her heart to her rescuer. Sir Charles, though attracted, is more reserved. It turns out that he is conditionally engaged to a noble Italian lady, Clementina della Porretta. He is quite willing to marry either lady, or even a third-his lovely ward, Emily Jervois, whose shy discovery that her filial regard for her guardian is really a much warmer feeling is treated by Richardson in his best manner. Sir Charles moves serenely through the tempests of emotion that he has aroused. But Harriet Byron, whom Richardson intended to be a compound of Pamela and of what, in happier circumstances, Clarissa would have been, never has a chance of sympathy. In fiction, as in real life, young women who are madly in love and unreserved in its expression exact too much from readers or friends. In the end, Clementina, torn by the conflict between her love and her duty as an Italian and a Catholic to her country, her family and her faith, decides against marriage with an English Protestant. The sacrifice costs her her reason, and Sir Charles and Harriet are married.

In literary finish "Sir Charles Grandison" is superior to "Pamela" or "Clarissa Harlowe "; in human interest it is inferior to both. It suffers most from the epistolary form of narrative, and gains from it fewer advantages. But the most damaging criticism is that the novel is untrue to the manners and habits of contemporary society. Of this charge the present generation can scarcely judge. The scenes are laid partly in Italy, of which Richardson knew nothing; partly in the fashionable world of London, which he never entered. His ignorance of Bologna is excusable; less pardonable would be mistakes in what he professes to be a picture of English social life. He himself recognised his danger. In one of his letters he asked:

How shall a man, obscurely situated, never delighting in public entertainments, nor in his youth able to frequent them, from narrowness of fortune, had he had a taste for them; one of the most attentive of men to the calls of his business; his situation for many years producing little but prospects of a numerous family; . . . naturally

shy and sheepish, and wanting more encouragement by smiles to draw him out than anybody thought it worth their while to give him ; how, I say, shall such a man pretend to describe and enter into characters in upper life? How shall such a one draw scenes of busy and yet elegant trifling?

His blunders struck those of his contemporaries who themselves knew the fashionable world. Walpole spoke contemptuously of his pictures of high life "as conceived by a bookseller." Chesterfield said that "whenever he goes, ultra crepidam, into high life, he grossly mistakes the modes, but," he adds, “to do him justice he never mistakes nature." Lady Mary WortleyMontagu was more violent in her belief that Richardson should confine his pen to " the amours of housemaids and the conversation at the stewards' table." Yet, like Chesterfield, she felt his power. "This Richardson is a strange fellow. I heartily despise him and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner."

In England, "The Sentimental Journey,' "The Man of Feeling," and a host of inferior works were more or less descended from Richardson, and his analysis of emotion set in progress a literary movement which still inspires novelists who, perhaps, have never read a line of his works. It was as the first sentimentalist that Richardson exercised his widest influence. He knew that England was, in this respect, less susceptible than the continent. In " Sir Charles Grandison " he says: "The French only are proud of sentiments at this day; the English cannot bear them; story, story, story is what they hunt after, whether sense or nonsense, probable or improbable." Continental nations were not concerned whether his pictures of English society were true or false. They were profoundly impressed by his transcripts of the inner life, and deeply stirred by his emotional appeals. Free from national colour, his characters attracted the peoples of every country. For the first time in the history of prose fiction, an English writer was acclaimed by Europe as a master.

Translated into French by Prévost, Richardson's novels were prodigiously popular in France. Walpole grudgingly admits several times in his correspondence that his "tedious lamentations were the talk of Paris. Diderot founded "La Religieuse "upon Clarissa Harlowe, and in an almost dithyrambic Éloge " ranked Richardson with Moses, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles. Still more striking is the extent to which his influence