Mary afterwards most justly reproached him—­that he talked about fine ladies and gentlemen without knowing anything about them.  It was quite natural for Lady Davers to be disgusted, to be incredulous, to be tyrannical, to be in a certain sense violent.  But it is improbable that she would in any case have spoken and behaved like a drunken fishfag quarrelling with another in the street:  and the extreme prolongation of the scene brings its impropriety more forcibly into view.  Here, as elsewhere (a point of great importance to which I may invite attention), Richardson follows out, with extraordinary minuteness and confidence, a wrong course:  and his very expertness in the process betrays him and brings him to grief.  If he had run the false scent for a few yards only it would not matter:  in a chase prolonged to something like “Hartleap Well” extension there is less excuse for his not finding it out.  Nevertheless it would of course be absurd not to rank this “knowledge of the human heart” among the claims which not only gave him but have kept his reputation.  I do not know that he shows it much less in the later part of the first two volumes (Pamela’s recurrent tortures of jealous curiosity about Sally Godfrey are admirable) or even in the dreary sequel.  But analysis for analysis’ sake can have few real, though it may have some pretended, devotees.

The foregoing remarks have been designed, less as a criticism of Pamela (which would be unnecessary here), or even of Richardson (which would be more in place, but shall be given in brief presently), than as an account and justification of the book’s position in the real subject of this volume—­the History of the English Novel.  And this account will dispense us from dealing, at corresponding length, with the individually more important but historically subordinate books which followed.  Of these Clarissa, as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged, diversified, and transposed Pamela, in which the attempts of a libertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr. B. upon a young lady of much more than proportionately higher station and qualities than Pamela’s, are—­as such success goes—­successful at last:  but only to result in the death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal.  The book is far longer than even the extended Pamela; has a much wider range; admits of episodes and minor plots, and is altogether much more ambitious; but still—­though the part of the seducer Lovelace is much more important than that of Mr. B.—­it is chiefly occupied with the heroine.  In Sir Charles Grandison, on the contrary, though no less than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, the author’s principal object is to depict—­in direct contrast to Mr. B. and Lovelace—­a “Good Man”—­the actual first title of the book, which he wisely altered.  This faultless and insufferable monster is frantically beloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties,