To begin with, the novel-attractions are presented with a completeness which, as has been pointed out in the last chapter, is almost entirely lacking before.  There is, of course, not very much plot, in the martinet sense of that word:  there never was in Richardson, despite his immense apparatus and elaboration.  The story is not knotted and unknotted; the wheel does not come full circle on itself; it merely runs along pleasantly till it is time for it to stop, and it stops rather abruptly.  The siege of Pamela’s virtue ends merely because the besieger is tired of assaults which fail, and of offering dishonourable terms of capitulation which are rejected:  because he prefers peace and alliance.  But such as it is, it is told with a spirit which must have been surprising enough to its readers, and which makes it, I confess, seem to me now much the best story in Richardson.  The various alarums and excursions of the siege itself go off smartly and briskly:  there may be more sequence than connection—­there is some connection, as in the case of that most unlucky and ill-treated person the Rev. Mr. Williams—­but the sequence is rapid and unbroken, and the constituents of it as it were jostle each other—­not in any unfavourable sense, but in a sort of rapid dance, “cross hands and down the middle,” which is inspiriting and contagious.  He lost this faculty later:  or rather he allowed it to be diluted and slackened into the interminable episodes of the not dissimilar though worse-starred plot against Clarissa, and the massacrant trivialities of the Italian part of Grandison.  But he had it here:  and it is not a fair argument to say (as even in these days I have known it said) that Pamela’s honour is a commodity of too little importance to justify such a pother about it.

This may bring us to the characters.  They also are not of the absolutely first class—­excepting, as to be discussed later, the great attempt of Lovelace, Richardson’s never are.  But they are an immense advance on the personages that did duty as persons in preceding novels, even in Defoe.  “Mr. B.” himself is indeed not very capital.  One does not quite see why a man who went on as long as he did and used the means which he permitted himself to use, did not go on longer or use them more thoroughly.  But Richardson has at least vindicated his much-praised “knowledge of the human heart” by recognising two truths:  first, that there are many natures (perhaps most) who are constantly tempted to “over-bid”—­to give more and more for something that they want and cannot get; and, secondly, that there are others (again, perhaps, the majority, if not always the same individuals) who, when they are peremptorily told not to do a thing, at once determine to do it.  It was to Lady Davers mainly that Pamela owed her escape from the fate of Clarissa, though she would hardly have taken, or had the chance of taking, that fate in the same way.  As for the minor characters, at least