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"dangled after his mistress, with the great gilt Bible under his arm, to St. Bride's, on a Sunday, brought home the text, repeated the divisions of the discourse, dined at twelve, and regaled, upon a gaudy day, with buns and beer at Islington, or Mile-End"-like his crop-eared fellow in Foote's Minor-no biographer has told us. It may, nevertheless, be safely asserted that he did not, like Hogarth's Thomas Idle, tear his 'Prentice's Guide, and peruse instead the profane broadside ballads of what Gent calls the "wide-mouthed, stentorian hawkers." On the contrary, there is good ground, as we shall see presently, for concluding that, like Francis Goodchild, he duly shared his hymnbook at church with his master's daughter, and otherwise foreshadowed and anticipated the career of that excellent and exemplary young man.

But although, in Mr. Wilde's shop, the "stream ran by his lips "—to use Mrs. Barbauld's poetical figurehe did not, during his probation, find it very easy to gratify his thirst for reading. "I served," he says of his apprenticeship, "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 fellowservants 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 correspondence with a gentleman, greatly my superior in degree, and of ample fortune, who, had he lived, intended high things for me; these 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." The unknown gentleman's letters, it appears subsequently, related mainly to his own travels and transactions; he was "a master of the epistolary style," and his curious fancy for corresponding with a city printer's apprentice who wanted practice in pen-craft, might have supplied the Philosopher Square with a fresh illustration of the "eternal fitness of things." Eventually the gentleman died, depriving his young friend of a valuable patron; and by request, the letters, on both sides, were burned. But, as far as Richardson was concerned, they served their turn by giving readiness and fluency to his natural habit of the pen. They may even have done more. "Early familiar Letter-writing," he said later in Clarissa, "is one of the greatest openers and improvers of the mind that man or woman can be employed in."

If his apprenticeship began in 1706 and lasted seven years, it must have come to an end in 1713. For five or six years more he continued to work as a compositor and corrector of the press, and part of the time as an overseer. Then, in 1719, he took up his freedom, and began business as a master printer in an unidentified court in Fleet Street, filling his spare time by the preparation for the booksellers of prefaces, indexes, and what he terms vaguely "honest dedications." It is probably to this occupation that we owe the elaborate Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, etc.,

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contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, which he prepared in later life to accompany those novels. In 1721, two years after he had set up for himself, he confirmed his resemblance to Hogarth's "Industrious Apprentice" by marrying the daughter of his old master, John Wilde. This, with the exception that she gave the to the lady, was Mrs. Barbauld's original statement, wrong Christian name although some recent authorities, relying on Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, have preferred to believe that his father-in-law was one Allington Wilde of Clerkenwell. But Richardson's latest biographer, Miss Clara Thomson, has shown conclusively that, apparent from Richardson's will,-Allington Wilde was as is moreover his brother-in-law, and that his wife, Martha Wilde, to whom, by the registers of Charterhouse Chapel, he was married on the 23rd November 1721, was the daughter of John Wilde of Aldersgate Street and Martha A. Allington, after whom Mrs. Richardson's brother was no doubt named.

"It's not Mrs. Brown that lies there," Thackeray's Brown the Elder, explaining dolefully writes to Brown the Younger that a certain sarcophagus at Funchal does not enclose his late aunt's remains. Probably Martha Wilde, too, had predecessors, although we need perhaps scarcely go as far as to conclude with Miss Thomson that Richardson's marriage was "prompted mainly by prudential considerations." But from a sentimentalist, sentiment must be expected, and in a later letter to a correspondent, he more than hints at previous love-affairs, which, apart from the fact that, owing to his bashfulness, they seem always to have originated with the weaker sex, had also the

drawback of being generally impracticable. "A pretty ideot," he writes, "was once proposed, with very high terms, his [Richardson's] circumstances considered; her worthy uncle thought this man [R. again] would behave compassionately to her. A violent Roman Catholic lady was another, of a fine fortune, a zealous professor; whose terms were (all her fortune in her own power a very apron-string tenure!) two years' probation, and her confessor's report in favour of his being a true proselyte at the end of them.- Another, a gay, high-spirited, volatile lady, whose next friend offered to be his friend, in fear of her becoming the prey (at the public places she constantly frequented) of some vile fortune-hunter. Another there was whom

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his soul loved; but with a reverence -Hush! - Pen,

lie thee down!" And then comes what the writer elsewhere describes as "an interrupting sigh," and "a short abruption." Mrs. Barbauld, who thinks that the "violent Roman Catholic lady" may have given the first hint of Clementina in Sir Charles Grandison, adds that the tender circumstances last hinted at were supposed by the novelist's friends to be obscurely shadowed out in The History of Mrs. Beaumont, which she prints at the end of her fifth volume, and which Richardson could never relate without a certain suspicious animation. But his personal love-affairs, as far as they have been revealed to us, possess but slender biographical importance, and certainly lack the element of romance which he was able to infuse into his stories.

Beyond the births successively of six children, all of whom but one, a boy, died in infancy, there is little to chronicle in Richardson's life for the next few years.

Almost the only notable incident between his first marriage and the publication of Pamela, was his brief connection with The True Briton, a bi-weekly political paper established by Philip, Duke of Wharton, in June 1723 (just before the exile of Atterbury), in opposi tion to the Government, and in the interests of the Jacobites. This, which was published by T. Payne, near Stationers' Hall, was at first printed by Richardson, whose name, fortunately for himself, did not appear, since an information was speedily lodged against the publisher in regard to Nos. 3, 4, 5, and 6 as being more than "common libels." It is suggested by Nichols in his Literary Anecdotes that No. 6, which refers, among other things, to the Bishop of Rochester, may have been written by Richardson himself. But Wharton's biographer, Mr. J. R. Robinson, plainly attributes it to Wharton; and it is extremely improbable that Richardson's cautious, and even timorous nature would have permitted him to put pen to any performance of the kind. It is still more improbable that the obscure printer of The True Briton, with which, moreover, he prudently severed his connection at the above-mentioned sixth number, could ever have been on really intimate terms with the brilliant and witty profligate, whose portrait after Jervas, coupled with "His Grace's PROTEST against the Bill for Inflicting certain Pains and Penalties on Francis late Lord Bishop of Rochester," was at the time in all the printshops; and who, two years later, left England for Yet not only has it been suggested that Richardson had special opportunities for studying refined libertinism in the person of Wharton, but that he obtained a sufficient acquaintance with his character to

ever.

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