to madness; 'but I thought that would do little good, so I began to make a raft,' &c. Little by little he calms down, often fairly giving way to the horrors of his situation, but always, after a time, setting to work manfully on whatever comes next to hand, until at last his mind grows into a state of settled content and cheerfulness, to which none but a man ribbed with tripled steel could have attained. There is a fearless humility about the whole conception of Crusoe of which we have almost lost the tradition." 1 One of the great attractions of "Robinson Crusoe" is the boundless scope which it gives to the imagination of the reader in conjecturing what he would have done had he occupied Crusoe's position. This helps to give an interest to the smallest details, making us follow such passages as those in which he gives an account of his difficulties in getting a boat out to sea, the methods which he took to raise and preserve his crops, &c., with something of a personal interest. The fine and sublime conception of a shipwrecked mariner cast on a desert island is one which, to a writer with a genius less happily constituted for his subject than Defoe's, would have offered almost irresistible temptations to indulge in high-flown and philosophical meditations above the reach of the hero, and above the reach of humanity in general, thus, in great measure, taking away from the reader the power of, as it were, substituting himself for Crusoe, besides greatly diminishing the fascination of the story. The superiority of the first part of "Robinson Crusoe" is no doubt to be largely attributed to the excellence of the subject the second part, where the solitude is broken in upon by a crowd of planters and ship-captains, is little if at all superior to Defoe's other novels.

A man of very different character from Defoe was our next great novelist, Samuel Richardson, the equable current of whose career is in striking contrast to Defoe's active and bustling life. In intellect, also, and in choice of subjects, the two men differ greatly, but there is some resemblance between their 1 Fitzjames Stephen on "The Relation of Novels to Life," in "Cam. bridge Essays" for 1855, p. 188.

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styles. Both loved great minuteness of detail, both were apt to deal too much in what may be called the "inventory" style of writing, omitting no fact or incident, even the least important, and both in consequence sometimes become intolerably long-winded, though there is a certain dramatic propriety about Defoe's tediousness which is wanting in Richardson's. An industrious, frugal, punctual man, attending carefully to business, and avoiding every kind of dissipation, Richardson passed a happy and blameless life, surrounded by a host of female admirers who were never tired of praising him. He drank in all their flattery with greedy ears; for he was a vain man, and, like most vain men, preferred the society of women to that of men. The story of his life presents no unusual or striking incidents, and need not detain us long. He was born in 1689, apprenticed to a printer in 1706, served his apprenticeship, worked for some years as a compositor, and then set up in business on his own account in Fleet Street. To the end of his life he continued to keep his shop, and was thus able to avoid the many hardships and privations which in his day were the common lot of men of letters. Perhaps in all London it would not have been possible to find a man who to the casual observer bore a more thoroughly commonplace appearance.

Yet in this man there was a spark of the divine fire of genius, and although he was well advanced in life before he thought of appearing as an author, it so happened that he had unintentionally from a very early period been training himself for the work which he was to accomplish. "As a bashful

and not forward boy," he writes, "I was an early favourite with all the young women of taste and reading in the neighbourhood. 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.

"I was not more than thirteen when three of these young women, unknown to each other, having a high opinion of my

taciturnity, revealed to me their love secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies to write after, or correct, for answers to their lovers' letters; nor did any of them ever know that I was the secretary to the other. I have been directed to chide, and even repulse, at the very time that the heart of the chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing with esteem and affection, and the fair repulser, dreading to be taken at her word, directing this word or that expression to be softened or changed. One, highly gratified with her lover's fervour and vows of everlasting love, has said, when I have asked her direction, 'I cannot tell you what to write; but' (her heart on her lips) 'you cannot write too kindly;' all her fear was only that she should incur slight for her kindness."

Thus it was that Richardson began to acquire that knowledge of the depths and windings of the human heart which constitute his strength as a novelist. The occupation above described does not appear to be a very suitable one for a boy of thirteen, and it must be confessed that Richardson had in his character a good deal of the prig and not a little of the milksop. Yet it is to his engaging in this curious employment that we owe Pamela" and "Clarissa." Having found out that he had a talent for letter-writing, Richardson continued to practise the art as much as his opportunities allowed, and thus acquired considerable facility in composition. About 1739 two booksellers asked him to write for them "a little book of familiar letters on the useful concerns of common life." He consented; the design gradually expanded under his hands; and "Pamela" was the result. The first two volumes appeared in 1741, and were received with a chorus of public approbation comparable to that which welcomed "Waverley" or the "Pickwick Papers." Dr. Sherlock recommended the work from the pulpit. Pope declared that it would do more good than twenty volumes of sermons. One enthusiastic gentleman went so far as to say that if all other books were to be burned, the Bible and "Pamela" should be preserved. Nor was the enthusiasm about the book confined to England. It was translated into French, and excited as

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great a furore on the other side of the Channel as here. This extraordinary blaze of popularity seems very strange to us. Besides the coarseness of many of the details, which may be excused, as the fashion of the age allowed an amount of plain speaking which we should now think quite intolerable, there is in the book a mawkish tediousness and a sort of canting virtue which tend to repel the reader. One great reason for its success no doubt was that it was a novel of quite a different character from any that had hitherto been published. "It requires," says Scott, "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 the unexpected return to truth and nature."

A spurious continuation of "Pamela" led Richardson to add to it two additional volumes, but they shared the common fate of continuations in turning out a failure, and are now seldom if ever read even by Richardson's most enthusiastic admirers. For some years after this Richardson kept silence, revolving in his mind the plot of the work on which rests his most enduring claim to remembrance. This was the noble and tragic story of "Clarissa," which was published eight years after the appearance of "Pamela." Though, like all his works, too long-winded, there is in it a power and a depth of pathos which keep the reader who has once fairly entered on its perusal enchained to the end. Nowhere in either English fiction or poetry is there drawn a figure more beautiful, intense, and splendid than that of Clarissa. Mrs. Oliphant does not exaggerate when she says that in this figure Richardson added at least one character to the inheritance of the world, of which Shakespeare need not have been ashamed—the most celestial thing, the highest imaginative effort of his generation. When the first four volumes of "Clarissa" appeared, and apprehensions began to be entertained that the catastrophe was to be unfortunate, requests crowded upon the author to spare the high-souled creature whom he had called into being, and wind up his story with the stereotyped happy ending. To

his credit be it said, Richardson steadfastly withstood all such importunities. He saw that if he were to save his heroine, he should inevitably degrade her, and thus ruin what is probably, with all its many defects, the grandest prose tragedy ever penned.

In Richardson's last great work, "Sir Charles Grandison," which was published in 1753, he sank below the level not only of "Clarissa," but even of "Pamela." At the instigation of some of his female admirers he set himself to portray the beau ideal of a "fine gentleman," who should unite in one person all excellences, mental, moral, and physical. The result is such as might have been apprehended. Sir Charles is "that faultless monster whom the world ne'er saw; a polite, moralising, irreproachable coxcomb," content to dwell in decencies for ever. "It is impossible for the reader to feel any sympathy with a hero whose worst trial is the doubt which of two beautiful and accomplished women, excellent in disposition and high in rank, sister excellences, as it were, both being devotedly attached to him, he shall be pleased to select for his bride, and this with so small a share of partiality towards either, that we cannot conceive his happiness to be endangered wherever his lot may fall, except by a generous compassion for her whom he must necessarily relinquish." "Sir Charles Grandison " now takes rank with the continuation of "Pamela," as utterly unreadable save by such omnivorous students as Macaulay, to whom every kind of literary food is palatable.

Richardson died in 1761, a much-respected, prosperous, and in the main worthy man. Vanity, the common vice of those who like him are contented to receive as infallible the opinions of their own petty circle of acquaintances, was his predominant failing. He could not, as Johnson expressed it in one of the many fine remarks which flashed from him in the heat of conversation, be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar. In company he had little to say except when the conversation turned upon his own works,