But enough of the workers, though not too much in the case of such remarkable contemporary exponents of a new kind of Human Comedy:  let us go to the work.

In the long “History of the Unexpected,” thick-strewn as it is with curiosities, there are few things odder than the appearance and the sequels of Pamela:  or Virtue Rewarded, which, in circumstances to be noted presently, is said to have been begun on November 12, 1739, was finished (as far as the first part goes) exactly two months later, and (there being, in the case of the author’s business, no obstacle of the kind that has frequently beset the appearance of greater works) was published later in the year 1740.  That author was over fifty years old:  though he had had much to do with ushering literature into the world, he had never attempted to produce it; he belonged to a class which was apt to regard belles lettres with profound suspicion; and his experiences, both in literature itself and in life, had been necessarily of the most limited kind.  But there were certain counterbalancing facts to be taken into consideration which, though they can hardly be said to be causes of the marvel—­the cause was the Hour, which hit, as it listed, on the Man—­were a little more than accidental occasions of it.  Richardson, as we see from his work, must have been a rather careful student of such novels as there were.  The name of his first heroine, with the essentially English throwing back of the accent added, is the same as that of one of Sidney’s heroines in the Arcadia, which had been not long before modernised for eighteenth-century reading by a certain Mrs. Stanley.  The not very usual form “Laurana,” which is the name of a character in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of Parismus.  Further, he had had curious early experiences (which we know from his own meticulous revelations) of writing love-letters, when he was a mere boy, for girl-friends of his to adapt in writing to their lovers.  “His eye,” he says, “had been always on the ladies,” though no doubt always also in the most honourable way.  And, quite recently, the crystallisation had been precipitated by a commission from two of his bookseller (i.e. publisher) patrons—­the founder of the House of Rivington and the unlucky Osborne who was knocked down by Johnson and picked up (not quite as one would wish to be) by Pope.  They asked him to prepare a series of “Familiar Letters on the useful concerns of common life.”  Five-and-twenty years before, he had heard in outline something like the story of Pamela.  In shaping this into letters he thought it might be a “new species of writing that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous with which novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue.”  His wife and “a young lady living with them,” to whom he had read