remarking that Richardson wrote this story at an age when many novelists have well-nigh completed their work; even as Defoe published his masterpiece, “Robinson Crusoe,” at fifty-eight.  But such forms as drama and fiction are the very ones where ripe maturity, a long and varied experience with the world and a trained hand in the technique of the craft, go for their full value.  A study of the chronology of novel-making will show that more acknowledged masterpieces were written after forty than before.  Beside the eighteenth century examples one places George Eliot, who wrote no fiction until she had nearly reached the alleged dead-line of mental activity:  Browning with his greatest poem, “The Ring and the Book,” published in his forty-eighth year; Du Maurier turning to fiction at sixty, and De Morgan still later.  Fame came to Richardson then late in life, and never man enjoyed it more.  Ladies with literary leanings (and the kind is independent of periods) used to drop into his place beyond Temple Bar—­for he was a bookseller as well as printer, and printed and sold his own wares—­to finger his volumes and have a chat about poor Pamela or the naughty Lovelace or impeccable Grandison.  For how, in sooth, could they keep away or avoid talking shop when they were bursting with the books just read?

And much, too, did Richardson enjoy the prosperity his stories, as well as other ventures, brought him, so that he might move out Hammersmith way where William Mortis and Cobden Sanderson have lived in our day, and have a fine house wherein to receive those same lady callers, who came in increasing flocks to his impromptu court where sat the prim, cherub-faced, elderly little printer.  It is all very quaint, like a Watteau painting or a bit of Dresden china, as we look back upon it through the time-mists of a century and a half.

In spite of its slow movement, the monotony of the letter form and the terribly utilitarian nature of its morals, “Pamela” has the essentials of interesting fiction; its heroine is placed in a plausible situation, she is herself life-like and her struggles are narrated with a sympathetic insight into the human heart—­or better, the female heart.  The gist of a plot so simple can be stated in few words:  Mr. B., the son of a lady who has benefited Pamela Andrews, a serving maid, tries to conquer her virtue while she resists all his attempts—­including an abduction, Richardson’s favorite device—­and as a reward of her chastity, he condescends to marry her, to her very great gratitude and delight.  The English Novel started out with a flourish of trumpets as to its moral purpose; latter-day criticism may take sides for or against the novel-with-a-purpose, but that Richardson justified his fiction writing upon moral grounds and upon those alone is shown in the descriptive title-page of the tale, too prolix to be often recalled and a good sample in its long-windedness of the past compared with the terse brevity of the