work had appeared before, perhaps none has appeared since, containing so many direct appeals to the passions, stated too in a manner so irresistible. And high as his reputation stood in his own country, it was even more exalted in those of France and Germany, whose imaginations are more easily excited, and their passions more easily moved by tales of fictitious distress, than are the cold-blooded English.-SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1821, Samuel Richardson.

Blest be the shade of Richardson, who bequeathed to us the divine Clarissa, shining through sufferings, glorious in her fall, and almost visible in her ascent to the regions of immortality. Matchless creation of the only mind that ever conceived and drew truly a Christian heroine, with all her sex's softness, loveliness, and grace, and all the self-devotion, undeviating rectitude, and lively faith of the primitive martyrs! What are his numerous blemishes but dust in the balance when compared to his endless beauties? But then his faults are obvious to every common mind, and no common mind takes in his merits.-GRANT, MRS. ANNE, 1826, Letter to Mrs. Hook, Feb. 13; Memoir and Correspondence, ed. Grant, vol. III, p. 70.

It is wonderful how the cause is seen in the effect. So we find it in Richardson. "Clarissa" is a story in the midst of temptation; but he comes clear and triumphantly out of the ordeal, because his own. imagination is not contaminated by it. If there had been the least hint of an immoral tendency, the slightest indication of a wish to inflame the passions, it would have been all over with him. The intention will always peep out-you do not communicate a disease if you are not infected with it yourself.-NORTHCOTE, JAMES, 1826-7, Conversations, ed. William Hazlitt.

"Clarissa," is a treatise on strategy. Twenty-four volumes to describe the siege and capture of a heart: It is worthy of Vauban.-VIGNY, ALFRED DE, 1833, Journal d'un poète.

He had, in fact, the power of making any set of notions, however, fantastical, appear as "truths of holy writ," to his readers. This he did by the authority with which he disposed of all things and by the infinite minuteness of his details. His gradations are so gentle, that we do

not at any one point, hesitate to follow him, and should descend with him to any depth before we perceive that our path had been unequal. By the means of this strange magic, we become anxious for the marriage of Pamela with her base master; because the author has so imperceptibly wrought on us the belief of an awful distance between the rights of an esquire and his servant, that our imaginations regard it in the place of all moral distinctions. After all, the general impression made on us by his works, is virtuous. Clementina is to the soul a new and majestic image, inspired by virtue and by love, which raises and refines its conceptions. She has all the depth and intensity of the Italian character, with all the purity of an angel. She is at the same time one of the grandest of tragic heroines, and the divinest of religions enthusiasts. Clarissa alone is above her.

Clarissa Harlowe is one of the books which leave us different beings from those which they find us. "Sadder and wiser" do we arise from its perusal. -TALFOURD, THOMAS NOON, 1842, On British Novels and Romances, pp. 12, 13.

I read the last volume of Clarissa, which I have not opened since my voyage from India in the Lord Hungerford. I nearly cried my eyes out.-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1850, Life and Letters, Diary, April 15, ed. Trevelyan.

I spoke to him [Lord Macaulay] once about "Clarissa." "Not read 'Clarissa!'" he cried out. "If you have once thoroughly entered on 'Clarissa,' and are infected by it, you can't leave it. When I was in India, I passed one hot season at the hills, and there were the governor-general, and the secretary of government, and the commander-in-chief, and their wives. I had 'Clarissa:' with me; and, as soon as they began to read, the whole station was in a passion of excitement about Miss Harlowe and her misfortunes and her scoundrelly Lovelace! The governor's wife seized the book, and the secretary waited for it, and the chief justice could not read it for tears!" He acted the whole scene: he paced up and down the Athenæum library : I daresay he could have spoken pages of the book,-of that book, and of what countless piles of others!--THACKERAY, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE, 1860, Nil Nisi Bonum, Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 1, p. 133.

Nothing can exceed the finished manner in which every personage of this splendid fiction is placed before the reader. The bashaw-father; the weak, amiable, depressed mother; the brutish brother; the sister who could never forgive the slight to her own attractions; the uncles; the hideous suitor whom her family wished Clarissa to marry; even the maid-servant -nay more, even the dead grandfather,

are your very intimate acquaintance. They remind one of those quaint old cabinet pictures, family portraits, which we see hung about near one grand painting a Correggio, perhaps, or a Raphael-delineating the purest and most perfect form of female loveliness. The portraits are out of keeping with this gem of the collection; they are too inferior even to act as foils: And so it is that we wonder how such a being as Clarissa could have been reared amid persons so thoroughly common-minded as the generality of her kinsfolk; so above that world which was all in all to them, and to rise in which was the great aim of their existence.-THOMSON, KATHERINE (GRACE WHARTON), 1862, The Literature of Society, vol. II, p. 243.

It is like a deluge of very weak and lukewarm green tea, breakfast cup after breakfast cup. After the first of the four volumes, into which the Tauchnitz edition is divided, we gave way. I was much interested with Richardson's method, and admired the particularity with which he puts his characters upon the canvas, and makes them live more in the smallest circumstances of daily life. By force of accumulated details they acquire fulness and reality. But when they come to act, when all the minutiae of their internal hesitations and emotions are insisted on with wearisome prolixity, one begins to feel that what one wants in Art is something other than the infinite particulars of life. Then Richardson, to my mind, is essentially a bourgeois, his imagination mediocre, his sentiment mawkish.-SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON, 1868, Life by Brown, vol. II, p. 19.

Here is an old stationer, fat, well to do, loving money and good living, vain as a peacock, worried to death by small critics who continually gave him dyspepsia and agonies of indigestion, and only soothed by the highly spiced flattery and the spiteful reprisals on his enemies of a

circle of foolish female friends; here is, to all appearance, one of the most unfit men in the world, who, after making money till he is fifty, is led by the paltry ambition of making more, to write a work which turns out to be utterly different from his first intention, and to prove the author a great moralist, who has the most intimate acquaintance with the human heart, its passions, foibles, strength, and virtues; who can describe almost as minutely as Defoe; who can teach while he amuses, and instruct the heart in virtue while he drives away the admiration for vice; who is powerful, tragic, pathetic, and eminently original; and whose art is so great that his readers follow their enchanter through eight long volumes, heaving a sigh of regret when they lay them down; while the student of morality pronounces them to have been a benefit to the human race.-FRISWELL, JAMES HAIN, 1869, Essays on English Writers, p. 271. He was a respectable tradesman, a good printer, a comfortable soul, never owing a guinea nor transgressing a rule of morality, and yet so much a poet, that he has added at least one character (Clarissa Harlowe) to the inheritance of the world, of which Shakespeare need not have been ashamed-the most celestial thing, the highest imaginative effort of his generation.-OLIPHANT, MARGARET O. W., 1869, Historical Sketches of the Reign of George Second, ch. x.

You cannot read through twenty pages of "Clarissa" without feeling that you are mainly in the company, not of the preacher Richardson, but of real live men. and women, whose movements, and sentiments, and motives are of importance to watch, and one of whom, the heroine, is a creature to inspire that deep interest always felt in any creature perfectly beautiful: her we can follow into the profoundest misfortunes, and still "in the midmost heart of grief" can "clasp a secret joy." To show, too, that Richardson felt what other artists feel, that a work of art must be mainly beautiful, the figure of Clarissa is made to occupy a place in his picture far more prominent than any one else; and a vast deal of the material which goes to make up the minor figures grouped about this central perfection, and distributed over the distance and

middle distance, a great proportion of the narrative upon which our ideas of the rest 、are formed, comes to us polarised through the medium of Clarissa's noble and lucid mind; so that, while we are frequently disgusted with the matter, we never lose sight of the perfection of Clarissa, whether as actor or narrator.-FORMAN, HENRY BUXTON, 1869, Samuel Richardson as Artist and Moralist, Fortnightly Review, vol. 12, p. 434.

There is no need that you should shout to make us afraid; that you should write out the lesson by itself, and in capitals, in order to distinguish it. We love art, and you have a scant amount of it; we want to be pleased, and you don't care to please us. You copy all the letters, detail the conversations, tell everything, prune nothing; your novels fill many volumes; spare us, use the scissors; be a literary man, not a registrar of archives. Do not pour out your library of documents on the high-road. Art is different from nature; the latter draws out, the first condenses. Twenty letters of twenty pages do not display a character; but one sharp word does. You are rendered heavy by your conscience, which drags you along step by step and low on the ground; you are afraid of your genius; you rein it in; you dare not use loud cries and frank words for violent moments. You flounder into emphatic and well-written phrases; you will not show nature as it is, as Shakspeare shows it, when, stung by passion as by a hot iron, it cries out, rears, and plunges over your barriers. You cannot love it, and your punishment is that you cannot see it.-TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. II, bk. iii, ch. vi, p. 169.

To me, I confess, "Clarissa Harlowe' is an unpleasant, not to say odious book.

If any book deserved the charge of "sickly sentimentality," it is this, and that it should have once been so widely popular, and thought admirably adapted to instruct young women in lessons of virtue and religion, shows a strange and perverted state of the public taste, not to say public morals.-FORSYTH, WILLIAM, 1871, The Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century, pp. 215, 216.

Unfortunately, Macaulay's stay on the Neilgherries [in 1834] coincided with the monsoon. "The rain streamed down in

floods. It was very seldom that I could see a hundred yards in front of me. During a month together I did not get two hours walking." He began to be bored, for the first and last time in his life: while his companions, who had not his resources, were ready to hang themselves for very dulness. There were

no books in the place except those that Macaulay had brought with him; among which, most luckily, was "Clarissa Harlowe." Aided by the rain outside, he soon talked his favourite romance into general favor. . . . An old Scotch doctor, a Jacobin and a freethinker, who could only be got to attend church by the positive orders of the governor-general, cried over the last volume until he was too ill to appear at dinner. The chief secretary-afterward, as Sir William Macnaghten, the hero and the victim of the darkest episode in our Indian history-declared that reading this copy of "Clarissa" under the inspiration of its owner's enthusiasm was nothing less than an epoch in his life. After the lapse of thirty years, when Ootacamund had long enjoyed the advantage of book-club and a circulating library, the tradition of Macaulay and his novel still lingered on with a tenacity most unusual in the ever-shifting society of an Indian station. - TREVELYAN, GEORGE OTTO, 1876, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, ch. vi, 1834-38, pp. 333, 334.

Nowhere in either English fiction or poetry is there drawn a figure more beautiful, intense, and splendid than that of Clarissa. Is probably, with all its many defects, the grandest prose tragedy ever penned.-NICOLL, HENRY, 1882, Landmarks of English Literature, pp. 211, 212.

By the universal acknowledgment of novel-readers, Clarissa is one of the most sympathetic, as she is one of the most lifelike, of all the women in literature, and Richardson has conducted her story with so much art and tact, that her very faults canonise her, and her weakness crowns the triumph of her chastity.— GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, p. 248.

"Pamela" and "Clarissa" are both terribly realistic; they contain passages of horror, and are in parts profoundly pathetic, whilst "Clarissa" is desperately courageous. Fielding, with all his swagger and bounce, gold lace and strong

language, has no more of the boldness than he has of the sublimity of the historian of Clarissa Harlowe.. "Clarissa Harlowe" has a place not merely amongst English novels, but amongst English women.-BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1892, Res Judicatæ, pp. 3, 20.

Let each to be judged after his kind: to break the glass of Richardson's hot house and let in the common air would only be to kill the tropical plants that he has grown under those fostering limitations; his characters live in a sick-room, but they would die in the open air. Any one who has once learnt to breathe in those confines must feel the beauty and charm of the sentimental growths that there luxuriate; a detached scene from "Clarissa" may jar on the critical sense, but read through, the book carries the reader clear of daily life, creates its own canons, and compels intent admiration.RALEIGH, WALTER, 1894, The English Novel, p. 160.

It has been truly said that "Clarissa Harlowe" is to "La Nouvelle Héloïse" what Rousseau's novel is to "Werther;" the three works are inseparably connected, because the bond between them is one of heredity. But while "Werther" and "Héloïse" are still read "Clarissa" is scarcely read at all, and this, beyond doubt, is the reason that, while no one thinks of disputing Goethe's indebtedness to Rousseau, it is to-day less easy to perceive the extent to which Rousseau is indebted to Richardson.-TEXTE, JOSEPH, 1895-99, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, tr. Matthews, p. 208.

If the story of Clarissa still lives, it is not by virtue of any of the subordinate characters, but by reason of the one matchless central figure, who stands unrivalled among the other inventions of her creator. And, as long as the English language is spoken or its literature read, the "divine Clarissa" will hold her own among the noblest of its ideal women, with Imogen, and Portia, and Cordelia. Torn from the proud pedestal of maidenhood, dragged, in an unclean company through foul and miry ways, a sacrifice. to vanity rather than to lust, she loses none of her charm or potency. For through her there speaks the authentic voice of the best women of all ages, who refuse to

disassociate love and respect from the most sacred of human relationships, or to subject themselves to the humiliation of a union unsanctioned by these motives. THOMSON, CLARA LINKLATER, 1900, Samuel Richardson, A Biographical and Critical Study, p. 207.

SIR CHARLES GRANDISON

1754

Will you permit me to take this opportunity, in sending a letter to Dr. Young, to address myself to you? It is very long ago that I wished to do it. Having finished your "Clarissa" (oh, the heavenly book!) I could have prayed you to write the history of a manly Clarissa, but I had not courage enough at that time. I should have it no more to-day, as this is only my first English letter-but I have it! It may be because I am now Klopstock's wife (I believe you know my husband by Mr. Honorst), and then I was only the single young girl. You have since written the manly Clarissa without my prayer. Oh, you have done it to the great joy and thanks of all your happy readers! Now you can write no more, you must write the history of an angel.KLOPSTOCK, MADAME FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB, 1757, Letter to Richardson, Nov. 29.

Richardson has sent me his "History of Sir Charles Grandison," in four volumes octavo, which amuses me. It is too long, and there is too much mere talk in it. Whenever he goes ultra crepidam, into high life, he grossly mistakes the modes; but, to do him justice, he never mistakes nature, and he has surely great knowledge and skill both in painting and in interesting the heart. -CHESTERFIELD, PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE LORD, 1753, Letter to David Mallett, Nov. 5.

When

I have now read over Richardson-he sinks horribly in his third volume (he does so in his story of Clarissa). he talks of Italy, it is plain he is no better acquainted with it than he is with the kingdom of Mancomugi. He might have made his Sir Charles's amour with Clementina begin in a convent, where the pensioners sometimes take great liberties; but that such familiarity should be permitted in her father's house, is as repugnant to custom, as it would be in London for a young lady of quality to dance on the ropes at Bartholomew fair: Neither does his hero behave to her in a manner

suitable to his nice notions. It was impossible a discerning man should not see her passion early enough to check it, if he had really designed it. His conduct puts me in mind of some ladies I have known, who could never find out a man to be in love with them, let him do or say what he would, till he made a direct attempt, and then they were so surprised, I warrant you!-MONTAGU, LADY MARY WORTLEY, 1755, Letter to the Countess of Bute, Oct. 20.

Do you never read now? I am a little piqued that you say nothing of Sir Charles Grandison; if you have not read it yet, read it for my sake. Perhaps Clarissa does not encourage you; but in my opinion it is much superior to Clarissa.GIBBON, EDWARD, 1756, Letter to Mrs. Porten, Miscellaneous Works, p. 227.

A masterpiece of the most healthy philosophy. . . Antiquity, can show nothing more exquisite.- MARMONTEL, JEAN FRANÇOIS, 1758, Mercure de France, August.

You admire Richardson, monsieur le marquis; how much greater would be your admiration, if, like me, you were in a position to compare the pictures of this great artist with nature; to see how natural his situations are, however seemingly romantic, and how true his portraits, for all their apparent exaggeration!-RousSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES, 1767, Letter to Marquis de Mirabeau.

I don't like those long and intolerable novels "Pamela" and "Clarissa." They have been successful because they excite the reader's curiosity even amidst a medley of trifles; but if the author had been imprudent enough to inform us at the very beginning that "Clarissa" and "Pamela" were in love with their persecutors, everything would have been spoiled, and the reader would have thrown the book aside.-VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS MARIE ARQUET, 1767, Letter, May 16. Who will not one of them submit To be Sir Charles' devoted slave; And, blindlings still, will not admit All the Dictator's teachings brave. But sneer and jeer, and run away, And hear no more he has to say. GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG, 1768, Epistle to Frederika Oeser; Grimm's Life of Goethe, tr. Adams, p. 152.

M. de Voltaire, in his numerous writings,

which I have read and re-read, has avoided, so far as I know, all mention of Richardson, whether favourable or otherwise, though he has treated of every other writer, however obscure. It is impossible that the author of "Nanine" should fail to appreciate "Pamela;" he has certainly read "Clarissa" and "Grandison," poems to which antiquity can produce no worthy rival. He must know that these masterpieces of feeling, truth, and moral teaching have found readers of both sexes, in every country and of every age. I suppose that, since M. de Voltaire's manner of writing is diametrically opposed to Richardson's, the silence he has preserved in regard to this author of genius is founded on principle.-MERCIER, SÉBASTIEN, 1773, Essai sur l'art dramatique, p. 326.

Clarissa! with Heaven itself radiant in your saintly beauty; free, in all your pain, alike from hatred and from bitterness, suffering without a groan, and perishing without a murmur; beloved Clementina! pure, and heavenly soul, who, amidst the harsh treatment of an unjust household, never lost your innocence with the loss of your reason; your eyes, bright souls, hold me with their charm; your sweet likeCHENIER, MARIE-ANDRÉ, 1794? Elégie, xiv. ness hastens to fill my fairest dreams!—

Throughout the entire composition, the author exhibits great powers of mind; but especially in describing the agitations caused by the passion of love in the bosom of the amiable and enthusiastic Clementina; whose madness is so finely drawn, that Doctor Warton thought it superior to that of Orestes in Euripides; and heightened by more exquisite touches of nature even than that of Shakspeare's Lear. Amongst other beauties in this work may be counted, the truth and delicacy with which the author has sketched the numlove of Emily Jervois, the imposing effect berless portraits it contains, the innocent with which Sir Charles is introduced, and the great art shewn in keeping him constantly in view.-MANGIN, EDWARD, 1810, ed., The Works of Samuel Richardson, Sketch, vol. I, p. xxii.

Sir Charles Grandison, whom I look upon as the prince of coxcombs; and so much the more impertinent as he is a moral one. His character appears to me "ugly all over with affectation.' There is not a