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Clarissa. "Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law," he would probably have answered with Goldsmith. He had a servile conception of the privileges of rank, and he had a thoroughly democratic belief in the chartered wrong-doing of the upper classes. Moreover, for the needs of his story, he did not for a moment intend that Lovelace should be punished by the law. "There is no fear of being hanged for such a crime as this while we have money or friends." "Besides, have we not been in danger before now, for worse facts?" These are Lovelace's own utterances to his bosom friend, John Belford, while sketching very brilliantly, it must be owned, and out of pure sporta fancy project for the abduction of Miss Howe and her mother.1

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Belford and Miss Howe are the chief secondary characters of Clarissa in whom it is possible to take any interest. The lady is a very charming personage and correspondent, and it is to her that Clarissa (save when it is intercepted by Lovelace) addresses the chronicle of her misfortunes. Miss Howe is a contrast to her friend, to whom she is devoted. She has common sense, high spirits, and wit, which last she makes use of to triumph over her worthy and rather ordinary lover, Mr. Charles Hickman. Belford is a brother-rake to whom, in the words of the Preface, Lovelace periodically "communicates, in confidence, all the secret purposes of an intriguing head and

1 The case of Lord Baltimore, to which Scott refers, presents certain curious affinities to that of Lovelace. Lord Baltimore was tried in 1768, twenty years after Clarissa, for a similar offence and acquitted. In his defence, while professing himself a man of pleasure, he warmly repudiated infidel opinions.

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resolute heart." the correspondence-no light task. Gradually, he is reformed by the spectacle of Clarissa's beauty and purity, and in the end becomes her chief friend and protector. There are some five-and-thirty other characters; but they are merely subordinate, and exist mainly for the sake of piecing the story as disclosed by the above-named four. Of these again, the chief are the members of the Harlowe family, the sombre, despotic father, the weak mother, the envious brother and jealous sister, the sordid uncles, alike in their characteristics of inherited pigheadedness and congenital stupidity.

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That Clarissa is Richardson's masterpiece, there can be no doubt. For Pamela is but an incondite production, which really ends in the second of its four volumes, while, in Grandison, though the manner is perfected, and the method matured, the movement of the story for the most part advances no more than a rocking-horse. But in Clarissa the simplicity of the central idea, the unhasting yet unresting evolution of the tragedy, and, above all, the extraordinary ability exhibited in the portraiture of the two leading personages, raise it immeasurably above either its forerunner or its successor. Richardson has been called an imaginative realist, by which we presume it is intended to convey that, as was said of Defoe, he lied like truth; and it is obvious that many of his ideas must represent abnormal accretions of invention around the minutest germs of experience. We have his own words, through Mrs. Barbauld, that, while professing to be natural, he had no personal knowledge of scenes corresponding to many that he has

described. But this would not prevent his hearing about them, and we suspect that the little writingcloset at North End must often have twittered with pious horror at new narratives of outraged innocence, or fresh disclosures of the vices of an aristocracy indicated respectfully by oral dashes and asterisks. Yet even this, though it might explain the scenes at Mrs. Sinclair's and the spunging-house, would not throw any light upon the vivacity of the Howe abduction letter, or the travesty of the pseudo-Lady Betty and "cousin Charlotte," or the inimitable scene in the glove-shop at King's Street, Covent Garden. Of these, and a hundred other passages, there is no solution but the presence of that uninherited and incommunicable quality which is Genius.

Although the publication of the three final volumes of Clarissa was so long deferred, it seems that the catastrophe was fully anticipated by many of the author's readers. "I know not," he says in a letter of 10th May 1748, after the issue of volumes three and four, "whether it [the sale] has not suffer'd much by the Catastrophe's being too much known and talked of. I intend another Sort of Happiness (founded on the Xn system) for my Heroine, than that which was to depend upon the Will and Pleasure, and uncertain Reformation and good Behaviour of a Vile Libertine, to whom I could not think of giving a Person of such Excellence. The sex give too much Countenance to Rakes of this vile Cast for any one to make such a Compliment to their Errors." "I had never . designed," he says again, "that the Catastrophe should be generally known. But one Friend and another got the Ms. out of my Hands;

and some of them must have indiscreetly, tho' without any bad Intention, talked of it in all places." In a later letter (7th Nov.) just before the issue of the concluding volumes, he says, "These [advance copies] will show you, Sir, that I intend more than a Novel or Romance by this Piece; and that it is of the Tragic Kind: In short, that I thought my principal Character could not be rewarded by any Happiness short of the Heavenly. But how have I suffered by this from the Cavils of some, from the Prayers of others, from the Intreaties of many more, to make what is called a Happy Ending!-Mr. Lyttelton, the late Mr. Thomson, Mr. Cibber, and Mr. Fielding have been among these." That the author of Joseph Andrews had welcomed the first instalment of Clarissa in the Jacobite's Journal, is already known; but it is interesting to find him among the advocates of "poetical justice." Cibber, however, is the only one of the four of whose views we have any definite particulars, and these are drawn from a letter written by Mrs. Pilkington to Richardson as far back as June 1745a very early date in the history of the book. She had related to Mr. Cibber, she says, "the catastrophe of the story" and the author's "truly religious and moral reason for it." Thereupon the tears stood in the eyes of the old comedian; he raved theatrically; he grew profane in his language. "He should no longer believe Providence, or eternal Wisdom, or Goodness governed the world, if merit, innocence, and beauty were to be so destroyed." Even Mrs. Pilkington herself did not approve the degradation of Clarissa. "Spare her virgin purity, dear Sir, spare it! Consider, if this

1 The poet of the Seasons died 27th August 1748.

wounds both Mr. Cibber and me (who neither of us set up for immaculate chastity), what must it do with those who possess that inestimable treasure?”

This, as we have said, was written in 1745, more than two years before the publication of the two earliest volumes. But the most impassioned appeal to the author did not reach him until after volumes three and four had come out. A lady, writing under the name of "Mrs. Belfour," demanded of him in October 1748, whether it were true that the story would end tragically, and requested a reply in the Whitehall Eveniny Post, in which paper, according to Mrs. Barbauld, Richardson inserted a notice. Thereupon, this excitable inquirer addressed an impassioned letter to him, imploring him to alter his scheme, and make his "almost despairing readers half mad with joy." She pleaded not only for Clarissa; she pleaded for the reformation of Lovelace. "If you disappoint me, attend to my curse," she went on. May the hatred of all the young, beautiful, and virtuous, for ever be your portion! and may your eyes never behold anything but age and deformity! may you meet with applause only from envious old maids, surly bachelors, and tyrannical parents! may you be doomed to the company of such! and after death, may their ugly souls haunt you! Now make Lovelace and Clarissa unhappy if you dare."

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Richardson replied, defending his action with more decision and spirit than might have been expected in an author "affected by tremors." He had designed, he said, to combat and expose the pernicious doctrine that a reformed rake makes the best husband; and he justifies his "unhappy ending," as he afterwards

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