more dangerous, a splendid and accomplished, a gay and smiling villain, who desires to possess her, only because she is hard to conquer: I always considered opposition and resistance as a challenge to do my worst.'

He spares no expense, scruples at no treachery, invents stories, forges letters, even gives the Harlowes servants of his own. Duty, humanity, prayers, entreaties, his own remorse, stay not the hand of the cruel executioner. She is vigilant, lives in the shadow of present and final judgment. Her life has been entrenched by precepts and principles. She reasons upon them, examines herself, and is conscientious where others are enthusiastic. With philosophic composure, she takes an inventory of character:

"That such a husband might unsettle me in all my own principles, and hazard my future hopes. That he has a very immoral character to women. That, knowing this, it is a high degree of impurity to think of joining in wedlock with such a man.'

Though gentle, she has pride; defends every inch of ground, renews the struggle each day and loses,-breaks, but bends not. Pamela had too little dignity, Clarissa has too much; the former was too submissive, the latter is too sublime.

Sir Charles Grandison (1753), designed to represent the ideal of a perfect man, in whom the elegance of fashion combines with the virtues of piety: The hero is courteous, gallant, generous, delicate, good, irreproachable — through a thousand pages. His mild and gracious wife, whose tears are the 'dewdrops of heaven,' says so:

'But could he be otherwise than the best of husbands, who was the most dutiful of sons, who is the most affectionate of brothers, the most faithful of friends; who is good upon principle in every relation of life?'

Style.- Epistolary, prolix, realistic, plain, business-like. He seems to have written utterly without artifice, using, on all occasions, the first words and the first incidents.

Rank.-De Foe had painted adventures rather than manners. To Richardson belongs the honor of having constructed the first epic of real life—the novel of character. Yet he was not of the world. He drew his inspiration less from observation than from introspection. Given the idea of a simple country girl, her ordinary situation, a fact or two from nature, he makes out all the rest by the mere force of reasoning imagination, as if nothing existed beyond the little room in which he writes. He describes

objects and events with the literal minuteness of a common diary, spinning the web and texture of his story from a myriad gossamer threads; yet never distracted, never forgetful of the single end; twining and linking the innumerable fibres to bring out a figure, an action, a lesson. While he twines, he colors. Unlike De Foe, who sees only the plain literal truth of things, he sees through an atmosphere of ideal light, sees things beautified, elevated above nature. His best paintings are pictures of the heart, expressions of the motives and feelings that make fellowship between man and man. Hence, apart from the story, a large element of the interest is in the sentiments uttered, in motives of action rather than modes.

We could wish that his characters were less circumspect, less calculating, less conscious. They preach too much. Pamela is a little too tame, Clarissa almost too heavenly. Sir Charles is proper as a wax figure - he never did a mean thing, nor made a wrong gesture. But we must not forget that idealization was Richardson's real excellence, as it was his necessity.

Character. As a writer he possessed original genius. He held in his hand almost all the moving strings of humanity, and made them vibrate in harmony. In the duties of morality and piety, regular and exemplary. Conscience, with its auxiliaries, religion, law, education, proprieties, was an armed sentinel guarding the way of life. Gentle, benevolent, and vain. His vanity grew by what it fed upon,—the flattery of female friends. He was always partial to female society. At thirteen he was the confidant of three young women; conducted their love correspondence, without betraying to one the fact that he was secretary and adviser to the others.

'As a bashful and not forward boy, I was an carly favorite with all young women of taste and reading in the neighborhood. Half a dozen of them, when met to work with their needles, used, when they got a book they liked, and thought I should, to borrow me to read to them; their mothers sometimes with them; and both mothers and daughters used to be pleased with the observations they put me upon making.'

He has portrayed himself in his novels. The following sentences are characteristic:

"The power of doing good to worthy objects is the only enviable circumstance in the lives of people of fortune.'

'Nothing in human nature is so God-like as the disposition to do good to our fellowcreatures.'

A good person will rather choose to be censured for doing his duty than for a defect in it.'

Neither a learned nor a fine education is of any other value than as it tends to improve the morals of men, and to make them wise and good.'

'The most durable ties of friendship are those which result from a union of minds formed upon religious principles.'

'All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views."1

'A good woman is one of the greatest glories of the creation.'

'It is a most improving exercise, as well with regard to style as to morals, to accustom ourselves early to write down everything of moment that befalls us.'

'There is a docile season, a learning-time in youth, which, suffered to elapse, and no foundation laid, seldom returns.'

Influence. When a man of ideas is a good man, and uses his strength for a noble purpose, he carries out the great thought of God; idealizes and beautifies life; multiplies humanity, justice, love, piety; increases the desire for excellence of manhood, of womanhood; and the powers of goodness which he sets afloat go on with the irresistible gravitation of the universe, for the Infinite is behind them. The ethical novelist is such a benefactor. He unfolds the soul of things to our eye, translates morality from the language of theory into that of practice, brings the higher and lower principles of action into striking antithesis, and prompts our affection to the good, sharpens our antipathy to the bad. Hence Pope praised the Pamela as likely to do more good than twenty volumes of sermons, and an eminent divine recommended it from the pulpit. When we consider how readers had yawned themselves to sleep over the old school of chivalric fable, with what delight they turned to this first 'romance of real life,' how fashionable circles made it the theme of their enthusiasm, we cannot doubt that Richardson opened up a spring of moral health,—a fountain which, beginning to flow, should never dry. Men and women looked in, became acquainted with the best things in them, saw the unsummed gold which slept unseen, saw of what manner of spirit they were, and this new light changed them. Thus old Grecian story relates how Narcissus went about among the rude, ill-mannered swains of Attica, and thought himself but one of them, till one day by accident he saw in the water a face more beautiful than Aphrodite's or Apollo's, and was astonished to learn that it was his own, and that he too belonged to the handsome kindred of the gods. Henceforth he went another

1 What great man, looking upon the everlasting ebb and flow of mortal things, snatching a kind of solemn joy from the giddiness which follows his gaze into the infinite, has not felt the same sense of pettiness-that the world, at best, is but a melancholy place, full of wasted purposes and fading images?

THE NOVELIST OF MANNERS.

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man, driving the swine a-field as if he were himself a god, scorning all unseemly and all ungodly conduct.

Perhaps the vice which Richardson chose to delineate does not admit, under modern taste, the slow anatomizing with which he exposes it. Owing, also, to their prolixity and poverty of style, his works have continually decreased in popularity. So essential is excellence of form to permanence of interest.

FIELDING.

Truth to English nature, and sympathy with manly quality, perform in Fielding, to a degree, the work of morality.—Bascom.

Biography.-Born in Somersetshire, in 1707; educated at Eton; studied law at Leyden, but quit 'money-bound' before completing his course; returned to England, and at twenty commenced writing for the comic stage; had abundance of health, plunged into jovial excess, took mischances easily; married at twenty-eight, adored his wife, retired to a small estate left him by his mother, feasted, gave dinners, kept fine horses, a pack of hounds, a magnificent retinue of servants in yellow livery, and in three years spent his inheritance and his wife's fortune; speculated in the Haymarket Theatre, and failed; finished his law studies, was admitted to the Bar in 1740, but was unsuccessful; continued to write for the support of his family, engaged actively in political controversy, always maintaining liberal principles; became a magistrate, destroyed bands of robbers, and earned the 'dirtiest money on earth'; lost his wife while they were struggling on in their worldly difficulties, was almost broken-hearted, and found no relief but in weeping, in concert with her maidservant, for the angel they mutually regretted'; naturally ended by marrying the maid; departed for Lisbon in the summer of 1754,' to restore his failing health, and there died on the 8th of the ensuing October. He had sown to the wind, and he reaped to the whirlwind.

Wednesday, June 23, 1754.-On this day the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld arose, and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doted with a mother-like fondness, guided by nature and passion, and uncured and unhardened by all the doctrine of that philosophical school where I had learned to bear pains and to despise death. -A Voyage to Lisbon.

Writings. Joseph Andrews (1742), conceived with the design of turning Pamela into ridicule. Joseph is Pamela's brother, and resists the advances of his mistress, as Pamela had resisted those of her master. Pamela herself is degraded from her moral elevation, and is represented as Lady Booby, whom the parson is compelled to reprove for laughing in church. The strength of the novel is Parson Adams, who is learned, amiable, innocent. He is unsuspectingly simple, absent-minded; declares that he would willingly walk ten miles to fetch his sermon on vanity, merely to convince Wilson of his thorough contempt for the vice; consoles himself for the loss of a Greek author by suddenly recollecting that he could not read it if he had it, because it is dark. He drinks beer, smokes pipes, moralizes, and, when necessary, uses his fists with effect and relish. He is Joseph's friend, and both are models of virtue and excellence. They give and receive many cuffs, have basins flung at their heads, their clothes rent by dogs, their horse stolen, never have any money, are threatened with imprisonment; yet they go merrily on, with thick skins, keen appetites, and potent stomachs. Rude jests, tavern brawls, ludicrous situations, combine to turn the tragic of Richardson into the grotesque.

Jonathan Wild (1743), an account of a famous thief, who turns thief-catcher, and ends his career at the gallows. Its best character is the prison chaplain, who exhorts the condemned man to repent, accepts from him a bowl of punch, because it is nowhere spoken against in Scripture,' then resumes his ghostly admonitions.

Tom Jones (1749), the history of a foundling; his masterpiece. It was written during the first year of his magistrate life, and contains a vast variety of lifelike characters (most of whose faces are red), drawn chiefly from the daily experience of the policebench. Western is a country squire, rich, fond of drink, ignorant, boorish, impatient of contradiction, and given up to every gust of passion; yet he has tenderness and tears, and when the wind changes, can be led like a child. Tom dares to fall in love with his daughter Sophy, who is the joy of my heart, and all the hope and comfort of my age.' Immediately Tom must be thrashed, and Sophy shall be turned out to 'starve and rot in the streets.' She reasons, he storms; she changes her tactics to