story; but little did I think to make a story of it for the press. That was owing to this occasion.

“ Mr Rivington and Mr Osborne, whose names are on the titlepage, had long been urging me to give them a little book (which, they said, they were eften asked after) of familiar letters on the useful concerns in common life; and, at last, I yielded to their importunity, and began to recollect such subjects as I thought would be useful in such a design, and formed several letters accordingly. And, among the rest, I thought of giving one or two as cautions to young folk circumstanced as Pamela was. Little did I think, at first, of making one, much less two volumes of it. But, when I began to recollect what had, so many years before, been told me by my friend, I thought the story, if written in an easy and natural manner, suitable to the simplicity of it, might possibly introduce a new species of writing, that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and, dismissing the improbable and marvellous, with which novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue. I therefore gave way to enlargement; and so Pamela became as you see her. But so little did I hope for the approbation of judges, that I had not the courage to send the two volumes to your ladies, until I found the books well received by the public.

"While I was writing the two volumes, my worthy-hearted wife, and the young lady who is with us, when I had read them some part of the story, which I had begun without their knowing

little closet every night,

it, used to come in to my with Have you any more of Pamela, Mr. R.? We are come to hear a little more of Pamela,' &c. This encouraged me to prosecute it, which I did so diligently, through all my other business, that, by a memorandum on my copy, I began it Nov. 10, 1739, and finished it Jan. 10, 1739-40. And I have often, censurable as I might be thought for my vanity for it, and lessening to the taste of my two female friends, had the story of Moliere's Old Woman in my thoughts upon the occasion.

"If justly low were my thoughts of this little history, you will wonder how it came by such an assuming and very impudent preface. It was thus :— The approbation of these two female friends, and of two more, who were so kind as to give me prefaces for it, but which were much too long and circumstantial, as I thought, made me resolve myself on writing a preface; I therefore, spirited by the good opinion of these four, and knowing that the judgments of nine parts in ten of readers were but in hanging-sleeves, struck a bold stroke in the preface you see, having the umbrage of the editor's character1 to screen myself behind.—And thus, sir, all is out."

1 Under the character of the Editor, he gave great commendations to the letters, for which he was blamed by some of his friends. ["The extreme delight which Richardson felt on a review of his own works, the works themselves witness. Each is an evidence of what some will deem a violent literary vanity. To Pamela is prefixed a letter from the editor, (whom we know to be the author,) consisting of one of the most minutely laboured panegyrics of the work itself, that even the blindest idolater of some ancient classic paid to the

Pamela, of which the reader has thus learned the origin, appeared in 1740, and made a most powerful sensation in the public. Hitherto, romances had been written, generally speaking, in the old French taste, containing the protracted amours of princes and princesses, told in language coldly extravagant, and metaphysically absurd. In these wearisome performances, there appeared not the most distant allusion to the ordinary tone of feeling, the slightest attempt to paint mankind as it exists in the ordinary walks of life—all was rant and bombast, stilt and buskin. It will be Richardson's eternal praise, did he merit no more, that he tore from his personages those painted vizards, which concealed, under a clumsy and affected disguise, every thing like the natural lineaments of the human countenance, and placed them before us bare-faced, in all the actual

object of his phrenetic imagination. In several places there, he contrives to repeat the striking parts of the narrative, which display the fertility of his imagination to great advantage. To the author's own edition of his Clarissa is appended an alphabetical arrangement of the sentiments dispersed throughout the work; and such was the fondness that dictated this voluminous arrangement, that such trivial aphorisms as habits are not easily changed;' 'men are known by their companions,' &c., seem alike to be the object of their author's admiration. This collection of sentiments, said indeed to have been sent him anonymously, is curious and useful, and shows the value of the work, by the extensive grasp of that mind, which could think so justly on such numerous topics. And in his third and final labours, to each volume of Sir Charles Grandison is not only prefixed a complete index, with as much exactness, as if it were a history of England, but there is also appended a list of the similes and allusions in the volume, · some of which do not exceed three or four, in nearly as many hundred pages."-D'ISRAELI.]

changes of feature and complexion, and all the light and shade of human passion. It requires a reader to be in some degree acquainted with the huge folios of inanity, over which our ancestors yawned themselves to sleep, ere he can estimate the delight they must have experienced from this unexpected return to truth and nature.

The simplicity of Richardson's tale aided the effect of surprise. An innocent young woman, whose virtue a dissolute master assails by violence, as well as all the milder means of seduction, conquers him at last, by persevering in the paths of rectitude; and is rewarded, by being raised to the station of his wife, the lawful participator in his rank and fortune. Such is the simple story by which the world was so much surprised and affected.

The judicious criticism of Mrs Barbauld has pointed out, that the character of Pamela is far from attaining a heroic cast of excellence. On the contrary, there is a strain of cold-blooded prudence which runs through all the latter part of the novel, to which we are obliged almost to deny the name of virtue. She appears originally to have had no love for Mr B-; no passion to combat in her own bosom; no treachery to subdue in the garrison while the enemy was before the walls. Richardson voluntarily evaded giving this colouring to his tale, because it was intended more for edification than for effect; and because the example of a soubrette falling desperately in love with a handsome young master, might have been imitated by many in that rank of life, who could not have

defended themselves exactly like Pamela against the object of so dangerous a passion. Besides, Richardson was upon principle unwilling to exhibit his favoured characters as greatly subject to violent passion of any kind, and was much disposed to dethrone Cupid, whom romance-writers had installed as the literal sovereign of gods and men. Still, the character of Pamela is somewhat sunk by the eager gratitude with which she accepts the hand of a tyrannical and cruel master, when he could not at a cheaper rate make himself master of her person. There is a parade of generosity on his side, and a humiliating degree of creeping submission on hers, which the case by no means calls for, and unless, like her namesake in Pope's Satire, Pamela could console herself with the "gilt chariot and the Flanders mares," we should have thought her more likely to be happy as the humble wife of poor Mr Williams, of whose honest affection she makes somewhat too politic a use in the course of her trials, and whom she discards too coolly when better prospects seem to open upon her.

It is, perhaps, invidious to enter too closely upon the general tendency of a work of entertainment. But when the admirers of Pamela challenged for that work the merit of doing more good than twenty sermons,' we must demur to the motion.

["This publication, we are told, which made its first appearance in 1740, was received with a burst of applause. Dr Sherlock recommended it from the pulpit. Mr Pope said it would do more good than twenty volumes of sermons; and another literary oracle declared, that if all other books were to be burnt, Pamela and the Bible should be preserved. Its success was not less brilliant in the world of fashion. Even at