some of it, used to come into his little closet every night with, “Have you any more of Pamela, Mr. R.?” Two other female friends joined in the interest and eulogy.  He finished it (that is, the first two volumes which contain the whole of the original idea) and published it, though at first with the business-like precaution of appearing to “edit” only, and the more business-like liberty of liberal praise of what he edited.  It became at once popular:  and received the often repeated, but to the author very annoying, compliment of piratical continuation.  So he set to work and continued it himself:  as usually (though by no means invariably) with rather diminished success.  On such points as the suggestion that he may have owed a debt to Marivaux (in Marianne) and others, little need be said here.  I have never had much doubt myself that the indebtedness existed:  though it would be rash, and is unnecessary, to attempt to determine to what extent and in what particular form.

It is by no means so difficult as it may at first sight appear to put oneself very much in the situation of a contemporary reader of Pamela, even if one has read it three or four times, provided that a fairly long period has elapsed since the last reading, and that the novels of the preceding age are fairly—­and freshly—­familiar.  The thing has been in fact done—­with unexpected but not in the least deliberate or suspicious success—­by the present writer, who has read the book after an interval of some fifteen years and just after reading (in some cases again, in some for the first time) most of the works noticed in the preceding chapter.  The difference of “the new species of writing” (one is reminded of the description of Spenser as “the new poet”) is almost startling:  and of a kind which Richardson pretty certainly did not fully apprehend when he used the phrase.  In order to appreciate it, one must not only leave out the two last volumes (which, as has been said, the first readers had not before them at all, and had better never have had) but also the second, or great part of it, which they would only have reached after they had been half whetted, half satiated, and wholly bribed, by the first.  The defects of this later part and indeed of the first itself will be duly noticed presently.  Let it be to us, for the moment, the story of Pamela up to and including “Mr. B.’s” repentance and amendment of mind:  and the “difference” of this story, which fills some hundred and twenty or thirty closely printed, double columned, royal octavo pages in the “Ballantyne Novels,” is (despite the awkwardness of such a form for the enjoyment of a novel) almost astounding.