It is pleasant to think of Richardson, now well into the sixties, amiable, plump and prosperous, surrounded for the remainder of his days—­he was to die seven years later at the ripe age of seventy-five—­by a bevy of admiring women, who, whether literary or merely human, gave this particular author that warm and convincing proof of popularity which, to most, is worth a good deal of chilly posthumous fame which a man is not there to enjoy.  Looking at his work retrospectively, one sees that it must always have authority, even if it fall deadly dull upon our ears to-day; for nothing can take away from him the distinction of originating that kind of fiction which, now well along towards its second century of existence, is still popular and powerful.  Richardson had no model; he shaped a form for himself.  Fielding, a greater genius, threw his fiction into a mold cast by earlier writers; moreover, he received his direct impulse away from the drama and towards the novel from Richardson himself.

The author of “Pamela” demonstrated once and for all the interest that lies in a sympathetic and truthful representation of character in contrast with that interest in incident for its own sake which means the subordination of character, so that the persons become mere subsidiary counters in the game.  And he exhibited such a knowledge of the subtler phases of the nooks and crannies of woman’s heart, as to be hailed as past-master down to the present day by a whole school of analysts and psychologues; for may it not be said that it is the popular distinction of the nineteenth century fiction to place woman in the pivotal position in that social complex which it is the business of the Novel to represent?  Do not our fiction and drama to-day—­the drama a belated ally of the Novel in this and other regards—­find in the delineation of the eternal feminine under new conditions of our time, its chief, its most significant motif?  If so, a special gratitude is due the placid little Mr. Richardson with his Pamelas, Clarissas and Harriets.  He found fiction unwritten so far as the chronicles of contemporary society were concerned, and left it in such shape that it was recognized as the natural quarry of all who would paint manners; a field to be worked by Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray, Trollope and George Eliot, and a modern army of latter and lesser students of life.  His faults were in part merely a reflection of his time; its low-pitched morality, its etiquette which often seems so absurd.  Partly it was his own, too; for he utterly lacked humor (save where unconscious) and never grasped the great truth, that in literary art the half is often more than the whole; The Terentian ne quid nimis had evidently not been taken to heart by Samuel Richardson, Esquire, of Hammersmith, author of “Clarissa Harlowe” in eight volumes, and Printer to the Queen.  Again and again one of Clarissa’s bursts of emotion under the tantalizing treatment of her seducer loses its effect because another burst