and other garnishes to the works he printed for them, asked him why he did not write some letters in the form of a novel, illustrating scenes in real life. They probably saw his talent in that direction, and thought that by means of it they might turn an honest penny for themselves and him. He took their advice, and his first famous novel, Pamela, was the result.

Were we to read Pamela to-day, knowing nothing of its history, the excitement and delight it caused on its first appearence would be incredible. While he was writing it he began by reading a little to his wife and a young lady visitor, and after that he says, they came every night to his study, saying, "Have you any more of Pamela, Mr. Richardson? We have come to have a little more of Pamela."

On its publication the story took every woman's heart by storm; nor was the admiration of the book confined to women only, it was read by men of the world as well as by scholars and critics. It created a sensation almost as great in France as in England, and the greatest thinkers in France, who were laying the foundations of ideas that were soon to appear in the French revolution, left off for a time discussion of graver matters, while they read with delight Samuel Richardson's novels.

It was several years after Pamela that Clarissa Harlowe appeared. This was his greatest success, and carried him to a height of fame that might have turned a stronger head than his. In both novels the plot had the same main-spring. Each heroine is subjected to the persecutions of an unprincipled lover, through whose baseness she suffers all kinds of trials; in the end the servant-maid, Pamela, turns her suitor into a good husband, by force of her beauty and virtues, while the gifted Clarissa sinks under the wrongs she suffers from the depraved Lovelace, and after calmly arranging her funeral, even to the fitting up of her coffin, she passes away amid the lamentations of friends and relatives.

Richardson has been specially praised because he drew his characters from life, and brought fiction from the regions.

of vague romance into the ordinary walks of human life. This is one of his merits, although in endeavoring to be realistic he is sometimes ludicrous. When Lovelace goes to see Clarissa, he writes to Belford the following account of her dress, for which we ought to be obliged to him, since it gives us a picture of a well-dressed woman in the year 1750; but it seems a little out of place from a man who is in a delirium of joy at meeting his beloved:

"Thou shall judge of her dress. I am a critic, thou know'st in women's dresses. There is such a native elegance in this lady that her person adorns what she wears, more than dress can adorn her. Her head-dress was Brussels lace, peculiarly adapted to the charming turn of her features; a sky-blue ribbon illustrated that. Her morning gown was a pale primrose colored paduasoy,* the cuffs and robings curiously embroidered in a pattern of roses and leaves; a pair of diamond snaps in her ears. Her ruffles were the same as her mob,† her apron, flowered lawn, her petticoat, white satin, quilted, her shoes, blue satin, braided with blue, without lace-for what need has the prettiest foot in the world for ornament? Neat buckles on them, and on her charming arms a pair of velvet glove-like muffs or mittens."

But it is his description of Clarissa's preparations for her death, and all the circumstances attending it, that Richardson's genius rises to its full height. All preparations for the burial are described with the minuteness of a fashionable auctioneer's catalogue. Belford, the friend of Lovelace, writes thus to him after a visit to Clarissa, who is sinking rapidly into a decline:

"She had slept better than I, although her solemn repository (her coffin, which Clarissa ordered some time before death) was under her window not far from her bedside. I was prevailed on to go up and look at the devices. Mrs. Lovick has since shown me a copy of the the draught by which all was ordered. And I will give thee a sketch of the symbols.

"The principal device, neatly etched, on a plate of white metal, is a

*Paduasoy-a silk, originally made in Padua.

† Mob-was a cap or head-dress.

crowned serpent with its tail in its mouth, forming a circle, the emblem of eternity, and in the circle made by it is this inscription;

CLARISSA HARLOWE,

April X,

(Then the year)

Etat. XIX.

"For ornaments: at top an hour-glass, winged; at bottom, an urn. Under the hour-glass, on another plate, this inscription:

Here the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.

Over the urn, near the bottom:

JOB 3-17.

Turn again unto thy rest, O my soul! For the Lord hath regarded thee, and why? Thou hast delivered my soul from death; mine eyes from tears; and my feet from falling. Ps. cxvi, 7, 8.

Over this text is the head of a white lily, snapped off short, and just falling from the stalk; and this inscription over that, between the principal plate and the lily:

"The days of man are but as grass. For he flourisheth as a flower of the field; for as soon as the wind passeth over it, it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more."-Ps. ciii, 15, 16.

She excused herself to the women on the score of her youth, and being used to draw for needle-work, for having shown more fancy than would perhaps be thought suitable on so solemn an occasion. The date, April 10th, she accounted for, as not being able to tell what her final day would be, and as that was the fatal day of her leaving her father's house. * * The burial dress was brought home with it (the coffin). The women had curiosity enough I suppose to see her open that. And, perhaps thou wouldst have been glad to have been present to have admired it too.”

*

If Clarissa had been a female undertaker, she could not more admirably have arranged for her death and burial. Yet all this, which seems to the modern reader overstrained sentimentality, sent the readers of that age weeping to their beds.

It is said that so many young women of the time fell in love with Lovelace, in spite of his vices, that Richardson felt as if he must write a novel which should contain an antidote to the dangerous fascinations of the hero of Clarissa. He accordingly constructed Sir Charles Grandison, who was

rich, well-born, well-bred, and a walking encyclopedia of all the virtues. You remember the hero in the fairy tale, whose gifts from eleven good fairies are at last made null and void by the curse of one evil fairy. This evil fairy came in at Sir Charles Grandison's baptism to endow him with insupportable priggishness, so that in spite of his virtues one can hardly endure him through the seven volumes that make this formidable story, which I fancy, very few readers of modern novels will ever read through. Walter Scott tells a story of an old lady of advanced age who preferred to have Sir Charles Grandison read aloud to her above all other books, "Because," she said, "should I fall asleep in the course of the reading, I am sure I shall have lost none of it, but shall find the characters where I left them, talking together in the cedar parlor."

Born 1707.

Henry Fielding, the greatest novelist of the group, owed his first success to a desire to satirize Richardson. Died 1754. His first novel, Joseph Andrews, was written to ridicule Richardson's Pamela, but it was so interesting and witty, that readers forgot it was intended for a burlesque, and read the story for its own sake.

Fielding is as hearty and vigorous as Richardson is sentimental. The two authors evidently did not like each other and the reason was grounded in nature, and not in any rivalry as authors. Fielding's novels are the first novels in literature, at once powerful, dramatic, and realistic. Yet it is difficult for any one bred in an age more refined, and especially for a woman, to appreciate heartily a story which depicts characters so without moral sense, or scenes so repulsive as are found in Tom Jones, Fielding's greatest novel. It hardly lessens our distaste to know that it is true to the life of the eighteenth century, when you like so little the kind of life it depicts. Yet the overflowing humor, the keen insight into human nature, the fresh, wholesome style, have kept the novels of Fielding at the very top of English fiction. And the debt our modern novelists, Thackeray,

Dickens and many of lesser note owe to him, is never to be reckoned. I cannot do better justice to Fielding than by quoting a paragraph from what Thackeray says of him:*

"What a genius! what a vigor! what a bright-eyed intelligence and observation! what a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! what a vast sympathy! what a cheerfulness! what a manly relish of life! what a love of human kind! what a POET is here! watching, meditating, brooding, creating! what multitudes of truths has that man left behind him! what generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly! what scholars he has formed and accustomed to the exercise of thoughtful humor and the manly play of wit! what a courage he -had! what a dauntless and constant cheerfulness of intellect, that burned bright and steady through all the storms of his life and never deserted its last wreck. It is wonderful to think of the pains and misery that man suffered; the pressure of want, illness, remorse, which he endured, and that the writer was neither malignant nor melancholy, his view of truth never warped, and his generous human kindness never surrendered."

On such a tribute, from such a man, I think we may fairly let Fielding's merits rest.

TALK XLV.

THE NOVELISTS SMOLLETT AND STERNE.

Born 1721.

Died 1771.

TOBIAS SMOLLETT is another of the great novelists of the period. Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker, are the titles of his most famous fictions. But his pages are disfigured by the same coarseness that repels us in Fielding, and he has not nearly as much genius. Thackeray, whose opinion of Fielding we have just quoted, says he thinks Humphrey Clinker the most laughable story ever written since the goodly art of novel-writing began. And Dickens has borne testimony to his power, in his own novel of David Copper

* Lectures on the English Humorists.