the lower examples are more than sufficient:  and Mrs. Jewkes wants very little of being a masterpiece.  But of course Pamela herself is the cynosure, such as there is.  She has had rather hard measure with critics for the last century and a little more.  The questions to ask now are, “Is she a probable human being?” and then, “Where are we to find a probable human being, worked out to the same degree, before?” I say unhesitatingly that the answer to the first is “Yes,” and the answer to the second “Nowhere.”  The last triumph of originality and individuality she does not indeed reach.  Richardson had, even more than other men of his century in England, a strong Gallic touch:  and he always tends to the type rather than the individual.  Beatrix Esmond is a coquette of the highest—­almost of the heroic-poetic—­class, but she is first of all Beatrix Esmond.  Blanche Amory is a middle-class minx, hardly heroic at all, but she is first of all Blanche Amory.  Becky Sharp is an adventuress who would go pretty close to, and perhaps not stop at, positive crime, but she is first of all Becky Sharp.  Pamela Andrews is not first of all—­perhaps she is hardly at all—­Pamela Andrews.  There might be fifty or five hundred Pamelas, while there could be only one of each of the others.  She is the pretty, good-natured, well-principled, and rather well-educated menial, whose prudence comes to the aid of her principles, whose pride does not interfere with either, and who has a certain—­it is hardly unfair to call it—­slyness which is of the sex rather than of the individual.  But, as such, she is quite admirably worked out—­a heroine of Racine in more detail and different circumstances, a triumph of art, and at the same time with so much nature that it is impossible to dismiss her as merely artificial.  The nearest thing to her in English prose fiction before (Marianne, of course, is closer in French) is Moll Flanders:  and good as Moll is, she is flat and lifeless in comparison with Pamela.  You may call “my master’s” mistress (actually in the honourable sense, but never in the dishonourable) again a minx, though a better minx than Blanche, if you like.  But there is no animal more alive than a minx:  and you will certainly not find a specimen of the species in any English novel before.

As for description and dialogue, there is not very much of the former in Pamela, though it might not be unfair to include under the head those details, after the manner of Defoe (such as Pamela’s list of purchases when she thinks she is going home), which supply their own measure of verisimilitude to the story.  But there are some things of the kind which Defoe never would have thought of—­such as the touches of the “tufts of grass” and the “pretty sort of wildflower that grows yonder near the elm, the fifth from us on the left,” which occur in the gipsy scene.  The dialogue plays a much more important part:  and may be brought into parallel with that in the Polite Conversation,