naïveté of Clarissa, the lofty passion of Clementina, find an utterance in every language, and similitudes in every civilized race.-LYTTON, EDWARD BULWER LORD, 1863-68, Caxtoniana, Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. III, p. 453.

Her [Jane Austen's] knowledge of Richardson's works was such as no one is likely again to acquire. Every circumstance narrated in "Sir Charles Grandison," all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends.-LEIGH, JAMES EDWARD AUSTEN, 1869, A Memoir of Jane Austen, p. 84.

I am working at Richardson now, and will send you the paper by the end of the week. I suppose I ought to be ashamed to confess that, tedious as he often is, I feel less difficulty in getting through him than in reading Fielding, and that as a matter of taste I actually prefer Lovelace to Tom Jones! I suppose that is one of the differences between men and women which even Ladies' Colleges will not set to rights. OLIPHANT, MARGARET O. W., 1869, Letters, p. 221.

He combines whilst he observes; his meditation develops the ideas of the moralist. No one in this age has equalled him in these detailed and comprehensive conceptions, which, grouping to a single end the passions of thirty characters, twine and colour the innumerable threads of the whole canvas, to bring out a figure, an action, or a lesson.-TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. II, bk. iii, ch. vi, p. 160.

That Richardson (with all his twaddle) is better than Fielding, I am quite certain. There is nothing at all comparable to Lovelace in all Fielding, whose characters are common and vulgar types; of Squires, Ostlers, Lady's maids, etc., very easily drawn. FITZGERALD, EDWARD, 1871, Letters, vol. I, p. 335.

It is not unpleasant to think that the ladies of that time, by the way in which they petted, coaxed, and humoured him, conferred an innocent pleasure upon the truest of all the delineators of their sex, except perhaps Balzac, who, if he knows it better, is more unfortunate in his

He started from a didactic point of view, and represented men as they ought to be within the social circumstances of the England of his time. His fluency is extraordinary, but his composition is monotonous.-SCHERR, J., 1874, A History of English Literature, tr. M. V., p. 152.

Here is a man, we might say, whose special characteristic it was to be a milksop-who provoked Fielding to a coarse hearty burst of ridicule-who was steeped in the incense of useless adulation from a throng of middle-aged lady worshipperswho wrote his novels expressly to recommend little unimpeachable moral maxims, as that evil courses lead to unhappy deaths, that ladies ought to observe the laws of propriety, and generally that it is an excellent thing to be thoroughly respectable; who lived an obscure life in a petty coterie in fourth-rate London society, and was in no respect at a point of view more exalted than that of his companions. What greater contrast can be imagined in its way than that between Richardson, with his second-rate eighteenth century priggishness and his twopenny-tract morality, and the modern school of French novelists, who are certainly not prigs, and whose morality is by no means that of tracts? We might have expected à priori that they would have summarily put him down, as, a hope

less Philistine.

Yet Richardson is idolised by some of their best writers, Balzac, for example, and George Sand, speak of him with reverence; and a writer who is, perhaps, as odd a contrast to Richardson as could well be imaginedAlfred de Musset-calls Clarissa le premier roman du monde. What is the secret which enables the steady old printer, with his singular limitation to his own career of time and space, to impose upon the Byronic Parisian of the next century? Amongst his contemporaries Diderot, the atheistic author of one of the filthiest novels extant expresses an almost fanatical admiration for his purity and power, and declares characteristically that he will place Richardson's works on the same shelf with those of Moses, Homer, Euripides, and other favourite writers; he even goes so far as to excuse Clarissa's belief in Christianity on

the ground of her youthful innocence.STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1874-92, Hours in a Library, vol. I, p. 48.

But the fact that Richardson commenced to write at fifty years of age, precludes the idea of his having possessed lofty creative genius: talent may slumber, as in his case, but genius never.-SMITH, GEORGE BARNETT, 1875, Henry Fielding, Poets and Novelists, p. 276.

While he was in Zurich, Wieland had been a rapturous admirer of Richardson's novels; he joined with Gillert and many others in admiring the faultless heroes set before the world by this novelist, Pamela and Clarissa and Grandison, and he even took the materials for a drama from one of these stories.-SCHERER, WILHELM, 1883-86, A History of German Literature, tr. Conybeare, vol. II, p. 44.

Richardson has a certain standard, the standard of the respectability of the day, and he tries to raise his readers to it both by showing them what a fine thing his ideal looks when it is endowed with life, and by pointing out that the path of virtue is the path of safety, which cannot be forsaken without peril of imminent disaster. Unfortunately Richardson spoils by his eargerness the moral as well as the artistic effect of his books. He is so bent on showing us that virtue is intrinsically admirable and a good investment into the bargain that he becomes absolutely incredible, and we laugh instead of being convinced. His most morally impressive book is that which is also artistically the greatest the book which telling of the heroic virtue of Clarissa shows us how it found its reward not in the cheap splendours amidst which we bid farewell to his earliest heroine, but in the solemn quiet of the grave, where the wicked Lovelace can no more trouble her, and she, the weary one, may lie at rest.—NOBLE, JAMES ASHCROFT, 1886, Morality in English Fiction, p. 16.

The fashion of this world passeth away. Only a hundred and forty years ago, a group of ladies, chiefly young girls just grown up, might have been found seated in a summer-house of a large garden of North End, Hammersmith, working or drawing, and listening eagerly to a stout old gentleman who was reading to them. from a manuscript. The ladies were Miss Mulso (afterwards Mrs. Chapone), Miss

Highmore, Miss Fielding, and several others; the old gentleman was Richardson, the book was "Clarissa." No one will dispute the severe propriety of any of these ladies, yet the far laxer standard which regulates the conduct of their greatgranddaughters forbids "Clarissa" even to be taken by them from the library bookshelf, much less to be positively read aloud, unexpurgated, in full family conclave. Yet the books that formed the interest and delight of our grandmothers cannot be wholly improper food for such of their descendants as have reached years of discretion. Therefore I, whose teens have long been a matter of history, may sit down to record the impressions made on me by Richardson's novels. -LANG, MRS. ANDREW, 1889, Morals and Manners in Richardson, The National Review, vol. 14, p. 321.

Richardson has to be not skimmed but studied; not sucked like an orange, nor swallowed like a lollipop, but attacked secundum artem like a dinner of many courses and wines. Once inside the vast and solid labyrinth of his intrigue, you must hold fast to the clue which you have caught upon entering, or the adventure proves impossible, and you emerge from his precincts defeated and disgraced. And by us children of Mudie, to whom a novel must be either a solemn brandy-andsoda or as it were a garrulous and vapid afternoon tea, adventures of that moment are not often attempted.-HENLEY, WILLIAM ERNEST, 1890, Views and Reviews, 216.

p.

Richardson's great forte consists in the art of making his characters live; in this particular he has rarely been rivalled, never, I think, excelled, by other authors. He employs not the mental dissecting-knife of modern writers. He affects not to analyze with a pretence of profoundity the implexicable workings of the mind. His method, on the contrary, is that of nature herself. The characters of his creations are revealed to us, like those of our friends, in what they say and do; and with so much of nature, so much of consistency, in the representation, that they grow into our intimacy as our friends themselves; they excite our love, our esteem, our compassion, or it may be our scorn, our detestation, as if they were veritably sentient and sensible beings. In a word,

the persons of Richardson's novels are no mere problems in psychology, but, relatively to the reader's affections, real creatures of flesh and blood, a consummation far more difficult of attainment.-WARD, WILLIAM C., 1890, Samuel Richardson, Gentleman's Magazine, N. S., vol. 44, p. 78.

The position, therefore, of Richardson in our literature is that of a great Nonconformist. He was not manufactured according to any established process. If I may employ a metaphor borrowed from his own most honourable craft, he was set up in a new kind of type. -BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1892, Res Judicatæ, p. 7.

No men were ever more absolutely antipathetic-more fundamentally and radically antagonistic than Richardson with his shrinking, prudish, careful, selfsearching nature, and Fielding with his large, reckless, generous, exuberant temperament. Their literary methods were no less opposed. The one, with the schooling of a tradesman, was mainly a spectator ab intra; the other, with the education of a gentleman, mainly a spectator ab extra. One had an unrivalled knowledge of Woman; the other an unrivalled experience of Man. To Richardson's subjective gifts were added an extraordinary persistence of mental application, and a merciless power of cumulative details; to Fielding's objective faculty, the keen perceptions of a humorist, and a matchless vein of irony. Both were reputed to have written "le premier roman du monde.” Each has been called by his admirers the Father of the English Novel. It would be more exact to divide the paternity-to speak of Richardson as the Father of the Novel of Sentiment, and Fielding as the Father of the Novel of Manners. DOBSON, AUSTIN, 1893, Richardson at Home, Scribner's Magazine, vol. 14, p. 383.

It is true that the novel was developed, and not created, but it is not more true of Richardson's novel than of any other new species of composition, such as Marlowe's tragedy, or Scott's romantic tale, or Byron's personal epic. All alike are developed, not created, in the sense of having many affinities with the kind of literature immediately anterior to them. Thus in the novel of manners there are two elements-there is a description of ordinary character, and there is a plot-interest

-i. e., there is a story. Both of these elements are found in the generation before Richardson, but not in combination. It was he that combined them in his novel of manners, and therefore is he entitled to the praise of having invented a new species of composition. -MINTO, WILLIAM, 1894, The Literature of the Georgian Era, ed. Knight, p. 104.

There was no machinery, no plot, no classicism, no style-but sentiment in abundance and vast prolixity, and everrecurring villainies, and "pillows bedew'd with tears." The particularity and fulness of his descriptions were something wonderful; every button on a coat, every ring on the fingers, every tint of a ribbon, every ruffle on a cap, every ruffle of emotion, every dimple in a cheek is pictured, and then the "pillows bedew'd with tears."-MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1895, English Lands Letters and Kings, Queen Anne and the Georges, p. 64.

He

Richardson could not aspire to any literary graces; his resources were too few and his methods too simple for such an ambition. But in his delicate and discriminating character drawing he inevitably developed a new literary appliance. was bound to eschew theory, to avoid any cataloguing of characteristics, to lay aside the old modes of the seventeenthcentury Theophrastuses, and to subordinate his drawing of character to his story. He must perforce be simple, and proceed step by step, discarding all pedantry, and allowing the character to reveal itself with the inevitableness of reality.CRAIK, HENRY, 1895, ed., English Prose, Introduction, vol. IV, p. 9.

His style, at its worst, is diffuse, clumsy, and involved; and, at its best, is no more than blunt, direct, and unaffected. When his characters are discussing the "social problems" of their day the diction is no better than the average contemporary pamphleteer's. His vocabulary is commonplace, shows no trace of selection, and is disfigured by that abuse of the current poetical phraseology into which even a Thomson was sometimes betrayed, and by force of which tears are transformed into "pearly fugitives." We are not, indeed, to look to Richardson for that nameless quality of style which is the property of a scholar and a gentleman, such as Fielding was; for Richardson

belongs to neither category. On the other hand, it would be grossly unfair to be blind to the great knack of extremely racy and idiomatic colloquial English which he displays in his dialogue; or to grudge him the merits of straightforwardness and spirit; or to refuse to admit that at times he shows complete command over the instrument of modern powers and compass. The effects, indeed, which he more than once achieves seem out of all proportion to the poverty of his means. -MILLAR, J. H., 1895, English Prose, ed. Craik, vol. IV, p. 58.

To-day the works of Richardson are entirely forgotten. Of these once famous novels the public no longer knows anything beyond the titles. Even the critics scarcely pay any attention to the man who was considered the greatest of all English writers in point of pathos, and if "Tom Jones," the "Vicar of Wakefield" and "Robinson Crusoe" are still read, "Clarissa Harlowe' is read no more than "Clélie" or "Le Grand Cyrus." This neglect may be explained, but it cannot be justified. Richardson's work must always be of the highest importance in the history of fiction, by reason of the magnitude of the revolution he effected. His very faults even, obvious as they are, stamp him with originality. TEXTE, JOSEPH, 1895-99, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, tr. Matthews, p. 165.

I do not for one moment believe that it was the blithe and brutal coarseness of Fielding's novels that exiled them from the female heart, that inconsistent heart which never fluttered over the more repellent indecency of "Pamela." Insidious influences were at work within the dovecotes. The eighteenth-century woman, while less given to self-analysis and selfassertion than her successor to-day, was just as conscious of her own nature, its resistless force, its inalienable laws, its permanent limitations; and in Richardson she recognized the artist who had divined her subtleties, and had given them form and color. His correspondence with women is unlike anything else the period has to show. To him they had an independence of thought and action which took the rest of mankind a hundred years longer to concede; and it is not surprising to see the fervent homage this stout little

tradesman of sixty received from his female flatterers, when we remember that he and he alone in all his century had looked into the rebellious secrets of their hearts with understanding and with reverence.-REPPLIER, AGNES, 1897, Varia, p. 202.

But

What was Richardson's addition to literature may be described in a condensed form as a combination of art in the progress of a narrative, force in the evolution of pathos, and morality founded upon a profound study of conduct. Of the group, he was the one who wrote least correctly; Richardson, as a pure man of letters, is the inferior, not merely of Fielding and Sterne, but of Smollett. He knows no form but the tedious and imperfect artifice of a series of letters. He is often without distinction, always without elegance and wit; he is pedantic, careless, profuse; he seems to write for hours and hours, his wig thrown over the back of a chair, his stockings down at heel. the accidents of his life and temperament had inducted him into an extraordinary knowledge of the female heart; while his imagination permitted him to clothe the commonplace reflections of very ordinary people in fascinating robes of simple fancy. fancy. He was slow of speech and lengthy, but he had a magic gift which obliged every one to listen to him. The minuteness of Richardson's observations of common life added extremely to the pleasure which his novels gave to readers weary of the vagueness, the empty fustian of the heroic romances. His pages appealed to the instinct in the human mind which delights to be told over again, and told in scrupulous detail, that which it knows already. His readers, encouraged by his almost oily partiality for the moral conventions, gave themselves up to him without suspicion, and enjoyed each little triviality, each coarse touch of life, each prosaic circumstance, with perfect gusto, sure that, however vulgar they might be, they would lead up to the triumph of virtue. What these readers were really assisting at was the triumph of antiromantic realism.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1897, Short History of Modern English Literature, p. 242.

Richardson's expressed, and beyond the slightest doubt his sincere, purpose in all was, not to produce works of art, but