without any hurry or any discomposure, the author leads on the story; and in this way chiefly makes his strength and his restraint felt. His restraint is well seen in the description of the death of Lovelace, where inappreciative critics have asked for more horrors, and in his neglect of all appeals to reprieve Clarissa and reform Lovelace. "Virtue Rewarded" he had already treated in Pamela; the theme of Clarissa might rather be called "Virtue Triumphant," and in the treatment of this he knew that a happy ending is also a futile ending.

The character of Clarissa, her strength, patience, and gentleness in suffering, is perhaps rather heightened by her weaknesses, her irresolution and want of decision in action. In the earlier part of the story she wails greatly about the "multitude of punctilios and decorums which a young creature must dispense with" in a situation like hers, the inadequacy of her wardrobe oppresses her, and the dread of the indecorous in whatever form prevents her from taking any firm resolve even when she is appealed to by Lovelace,—she weeps and is silent, accepts his protection and calls him a wretch, and so is driven by circumstance from first to last. Her efforts to escape are feeble and seem almost half-hearted. Yet those critics are ill advised who call for the police, asserting that an appeal to the nearest magistrate would have put an end to the heroine's difficulties. Richardson's story and characters would be alike spoilt by the intrusion of probability and realism. He placed himself, says Coleridge, "as it were in a day-dream;" his atmosphere is that of "a sick-room heated by stoves," while Fielding carries

his reader "into an open lawn on a breezy day in May." Let each be judged after his kind: to break the glass of Richardson's hothouse and let in the common air would only be to kill the tropical plants that he has grown under those fostering limitations; his characters live in a sick-room, but they would die in the open air. Any one who has once learnt to breathe in those confines must feel the beauty and charm of the sentimental growths that there luxuriate; a detached scene from Clarissa may jar on the critical sense, but read through, the book carries the reader clear of daily life, creates its own canons, and compels intent admiration. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was one of the severest of Richardson's critics,-she said rightly that he had no idea of the manners of high life. She disliked the voluminous candour of his heroines, and could not forgive him his disrespect for old china,-"which is below. nobody's taste." Yet she fell under the spell of his sentiment; "I heartily despise him," she says, "and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works, in a most scandalous manner.'

It was by his sentiment that Richardson gained an immediate and enduring popularity, and became the founder of a school of novelists. Not in England alone, where "Sentiment" soon became the badge of a tribe of writers, but on the Continent, especially in France, Pamela and her sisters exercised a profound influence, the end of which is not very easily assigned. The novels were translated into French (one translation is by the author of Manon Lescaut), German, and Dutch; Goldoni in Italy wrote two comedies called Pamela

Nubile and Pamela Maritata; Wieland's tragedy, Clementine von Poretta, and Hermes' novel, Miss Fanny Wilkes, are after the same model, parodied by Musæus in Grandison der Zweite; and the independent works of Rousseau (La Nouvelle Heloise), Diderot (La Religieuse), Marmontel, and Bernardin de St. Pierre show unmistakable marks either in form or in substance of the sentimental sway exercised by Richardson, which continued in France down to the time when Alfred de Musset called Clarissa "le premier roman du monde." Thus Richardson is to be regarded not only as the founder of the modern novel in England, but also as in some sense the forerunner of all those writers who cultivated "sensibility," well defined by Mrs. Radcliffe as "a dangerous quality which is continually extracting the excess of misery or delight from every surrounding object," the inaugurator of a century and a half of hyperesthesia.

Yet The

A perfect chorus of applause greeted Pamela on her first appearance. "I can send you no news," wrote Horace Walpole in a juvenile letter; "the late singular novel is the universal, and only theme-Pamela is like snow, she covers everything with her whiteness." there were not lacking a few dissentient voices. pretentious morality of the book, lauded by Dr. Sherlock from his pulpit, and by Pope from his easy-chair, was of a kind to invite burlesque. As early as 1741, a burlesque appeared, entitled An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, by an anonymous writer. And by February, 1742, "a lewd and ungenerous engraftment," as Richardson calls it, on the story of the

M

virtuous servant-maid was published under the title The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams.

son.

This novel, which became the starting-point of a new school of fiction, was written by Henry Fielding, barrister, journalist, and playwright, whose early education and. experience of life were little likely to leave him susceptible to serious impression by the vulgar morality of RichardBorn in 1707 at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, the seat of his maternal grandfather, descended through his father, Edmund Fielding, from a younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh, Henry Fielding had seen much of men and manners, and was familiar with all classes of society before he reached the age of thirty-four. He was prepared for Eton by one Mr. Oliver, who, if he was indeed the original of Parson Trulliber, "could have acted the part of Falstaff without stuffing," had a loud and hoarse voice, and " a stateliness in his gait when he walked, not unlike that of a goose, only he stalked slower." About the time of his leaving Eton, while Richardson was accumulating the stock of morality that was to be compounded in that specific against elopements, Clarissa, Fielding was meditating an elopement on his own account with a Miss Sarah Andrew, whose guardian complained that he went in fear of his life "owing to the behaviour of Henry Fielding and his attendant or man." Foiled in this project, Fielding passed over to Leyden to study law with "the learned Vitriarius," but his remittances from home failing, he returned to London in 1728, to maintain himself in that city by his wits. His father, who had married a second

time, did not trouble himself to pay the allowance of two hundred a year, and Fielding, it would appear, troubled himself even less. He had already at Leyden laid the plan of a comedy called Don Quixote in England, and he now turned to the stage for his livelihood.

Fielding's dramatic labours have been almost eclipsed by his greater novels; yet he was an industrious and successful dramatic author from the production of his first comedy, Love in Several Masques, in 1728, down to his abandonment of the stage and admission to the Middle Temple after the appearance of his satirical play, The Historical Register for 1736, and the passing of the Licensing Act.

In Fielding the stage had found a great humourist and comic wit, but it failed to keep him, and the reasons are not far to seek. The dramatic conventions and fashions of the time gave him too little scope. Vanbrugh and Congreve, as he remarks in Tom Jones, copied Nature, the comedy writers of his own time only copied them, and so produced imitations of manners and satires on foibles that no longer reigned in the fashionable world. In one of his most successful plays, The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731), Fielding had parodied the extravagances of Lee, Rowe, Thomson, and Young. But the theme. was soon exhausted, and he sought more scope for the representation of contemporary life by plunging into political satire in Pasquin (1736), and The Historical Register (1737), in which candidates for Parliament are introduced bribing away "with right and left," and Sir