almost interminable to the reader to-day.  The slow movement is sufficient to preclude its present prosperity.  It is safe to say that Richardson is but little read now; read much less than his great contemporary, Fielding.  And apparently it is his bulk rather than his want of human interest or his antiquated manner that explains the fact.  The instinct to-day is against fiction that is slow and tortuous in its onward course; at least so it seemed until Mr. De Morgan returned in his delightful volumes to the method of the past.  Those are pertinent words of the distinguished Spanish novelist, Valdes:  “An author who wishes to be read not only in his life, but after his death (and the author who does not wish this should lay aside his pen), cannot shut his eyes, when unblinded by vanity, to the fact that not only is it necessary to be interesting to save himself from oblivion, but the story must not be a very long one.  The world contains so many great and beautiful works that it requires a long life to read them all.  To ask the public, always anxious for novelty, to read a production of inordinate length, when so many others are demanding attention, seems to me useless and ridiculous, ...  The most noteworthy instance of what I say is seen in the celebrated English novelist, Richardson, who, in spite of his admirable genius and exquisite sensibility and perspicuity, added to the fact of his being the father of the modern Novel, is scarcely read nowadays, at least in Latin countries.  Given the indisputable beauties of his works, this can only be due to their extreme length.  And the proof of this, that in France and Spain, to encourage the taste for them, the most interesting parts have been extracted and published in editions and compendiums.”

This is suggestive, coming from one who speaks by the book.  Who, in truth, reads epics now—­save in the enforced study of school and college?  Will not Browning’s larger works—­like “The Ring and the Book”—­suffer disastrously with the passing of time because of a lack of continence, of a failure to realize that since life is short, art should not be too long?  It may be, too, that Richardson, newly handling the sentiment which during the following generation was to become such a marked trait of imaginative letters, revelled in it to an extent unpalatable to our taste; “rubbing our noses,” as Leslie Stephen puts it, “in all her (Clarissa’s) agony,”—­the tendency to overdo a new thing, not to be resisted in his case.  But with all concessions to length and sentimentality, criticism from that day to this has been at one in agreeing that here is not only Richardson’s best book but a truly great Novel.  Certainly one who patiently submits to a ruminant reading of the story, will find that when at last the long-deferred climax is reached and the awed and penitent Lovelace describes the death-bed moments of the girl he has ruined, the scene has a great moving power.  Allowing for differences of taste and time, the vogue of the