such silly ideas come into your head-" shady bowers! and purling streams!"-Heavens, how insipid! Well' (continued she), 'you may be the Strephon of the woods, if you think fit; but I shall never envy the happiness of the Chloe that accompanies you in these fine recesses. What! to be cooped up like a tame dove, only to coo, and bill, and breed? O, it would be a delicious life, indeed!'"

CHAPTER VII.

RICHARDSON. -'CLARISSA HARLOWE.'-'PAMELA.'-'SIR CHARLES GRANDISON.'-RICHARDSON'S CORRESPONDENCE.-HIS PORTRAIT DRAWN BY HIMSELF.

IF my object were to give a history of fiction in the eighteenth century, there is hardly any name which would more deservedly claim our attention than the name of Defoe, who, of all novelists, is the one who has given the most lifelike reality to his stories, and cheats his readers most easily into the belief that imaginary scenes are the narratives of actual fact. But my purpose is different, and the works of Defoe throw little or no light upon the social manners of the age with which we have to deal, not to mention the difficulty there would be in conveying, without offence, an idea of such heroes and heroines as Captain Singleton, Roxana, Moll Flanders, and Colonel Jack. We may therefore dismiss from our notice the immortal author of 'Robinson Crusoe,' and turn to the next chief figure among the novelists of the

century, I mean Richardson, the author of 'Pamela,' 'Clarissa,' and 'Sir Charles Grandison."'"

And what are we to say of these famous novels which stirred to their inmost depths the hearts of a by-gone generation, and were regarded as the great literary feats of the age in which they appeared? Few, very few, read them now, but there are some minds for which they have attractions still. Lord Macaulay told Thackeray that when he produced 'Clarissa' one hot season at the hills in India, "the whole station was in a passion of excitement the Governor's wife seized the book, and the Secretary waited for it, and the Chief-Justice could not read it for tears." One enthusiastic admirer in the last century went so far as to say, that if all other books were to be burnt, 'Pamela' and the Bible should be preserved; and ladies at Ranelagh used to hold up the book in triumph to show that they were lucky enough to possess a copy. One of Richardson's correspondents, however, wrote to him that ladies complained that they could not read the letters of Pamela without blushing -and well they might.

Sir John Herschel tells an anecdote of a blacksmith at a much later period, who used to read the book to his village neighbors collected round his anvil, and when, at the end of the story, it turned out

that Pamela and her master were happily married, the unsophisticated rustics shouted for joy, and procuring the keys of the church set the bells ringing. Mrs. Barbauld says that she well remembered a Frenchman who paid a visit to Hampstead, for the sole purpose of finding out the house in the Flask Walk where Clarissa lodged, and was surprised at the ignorance or indifference of the inhabitants on the subject. The Flask Walk was to him what the Rocks of Meillerie, on the Lake of Geneva, were to the worshippers of Rousseau.

But de gustibus haud disputandum, and every one must judge for himself

"Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri."

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

I read it through once, many years ago, and I should be sorry to do so again. As to the plot of the story, there is really almost none.

"Story? God bless you, I have none to tell, sir!"

A young lady leaves her father's house to avoid a distasteful marriage, and throws herself upon the protection of her lover, who, after in vain attempting to seduce her, succeeds in effecting her ruin by an act for

which he might have been hanged. He afterward offers to marry her, but she refuses, and retiring to solitary lodgings, dies broken-hearted, while the villain is killed abroad in a duel by a relative of the lady. Upon this foundation Richardson has built up seven or eight tedious volumes, consisting of letters between 'two young ladies of virtue and honor," Miss Clarissa Harlowe and Miss Howe, and "two gentlemen of free lives," Mr. Lovelace and Mr. Belford, besides others. The key-note of the whole composition is libertine pursuit, and we are wearied and disgusted by volume after volume devoted to the single subject of attack on a woman's chastity. It would be bad enough to read this if compressed into a few chapters, but it becomes intolerably repulsive when spun out in myriads of letters. 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.†

* Clarissa's will occupies nineteen closely-printed pages. + Two ladies, without the knowledge of each other, wrote to Richardson, the one blaming Clarissa as a coquette, and the other blaming her as a prude. He sent to each the letter of the other by way of an answer to both. See his 'Correspondence,' vol. vi. p. 82.