the courage to do this, daunted as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of verse, of the vantage-room of the stage.  Then there is the alternative of recounting it by the mouth of one of the actors in, or spectators of, the events—­a plan obvious, early, presenting some advantages, still very commonly followed, but always full of little traps and pits of improbability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the character (if he is made to have any) of the narrator himself.  Thirdly, there is the again easy resource of the “document” in its various forms.  Of these, letters and diaries possess some prerogative advantages; and were likely to suggest themselves very particularly at this time when the actual letter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) had for some generations appeared, and were beginning to be common.  In the first place the information thus obtained looks natural and plausible:  and there is a subsidiary advantage—­on which Richardson does not draw very much in Pamela, but which he employs to the full later—­that by varying your correspondents you can get different views of the same event, and first-hand manifestations of extremely different characters.

Its disadvantages, on the other hand, are equally obvious:  but there are two or three of them of especial importance.  In the first place, it is essentially an artificial rather than an artful plan—­its want of verisimilitude, as soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as that of either of the others if not greater.  In the second, without immense pains, it must be “gappy and scrappy,” while the more these pains are taken the more artificial it will become.  In the third, the book is extremely likely, in the taking of these pains and even without them, to become intolerably lengthy and verbose.  In the first part at least of the first part of Pamela, Richardson avoided these dangers fairly if not fully; in the second part he succumbed to them; in his two later novels, though more elaborate and important plots to some extent bore up the expansion, he succumbed to them almost more.  Pains have been taken above to show how the first readers of Pamela might rejoice in it, because of its contrast with the character of the seventeenth-century novel which was most read—­the Scudery or “heroic” romance.  It is not, I think, too severe to say that nothing but the parallel with that romance, and the tolerance induced by familiarity with it, could make any one put up with the second part of Pamela itself, or with the inhumanly prolonged divagation of Clarissa and Grandison.  Nor, as has been hinted, is the solace of the letters—­in the opportunity of setting forth different tempers and styles—­here much taken.