the Italian Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron.  The latter of these carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than of any great predilection on his own part) and the piece ends with a repetition, extension, and intensification of the bounties showered upon Pamela by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them.  Only of course “the good man” could never be guilty of Mr. B.’s meditated relapse from the path of rectitude, nor (one may perhaps add) does Miss Byron seem to possess the insinuating astuteness by which Pamela once more

    “Reconciles the new perverted man,”

to adapt the last line of A Lover’s Complaint to the situation.

Grandison, like Clarissa, has a much wider range of personage and incident than Pamela, and is again double the length of it.  No detailed criticism of these enormous books (both of which are conducted in the letter-form, though, in the latter case especially, with long retrospects and narratives which rather strain the style) is possible here.  But a few remarks on the characters of Lovelace and Clarissa, which have usually been regarded as Richardson’s greatest triumphs, may fitly precede some on his whole character as a novelist.

Admiration and sympathy, tempered with a few reserves, have been the general notes of comment on Clarissa:  and—­as she goes through the long martyrdom of persecution by her family for not marrying the man she does not love; of worse persecution from the man whom she does love, but who will not marry her, at least until he has conquered her virtue; and of perhaps worst when she feels it her duty to resist his repentant and (as such things go) honourable proffers after he has treacherously deprived her of technical honour—­compassion at least is impossible to refuse.  But “compassion,” though it literally translates “sympathy” from Greek into Latin, is not its synonym in English.  It is a disagreeable thing to have to say:  but Clarissa’s purity strikes one as having at once too much questionable prudery in it and too little honest prudence:  while her later resolution has as much false pride as real principle.  Even some of her admirers admit a want of straightforwardness in her; she has no passion, which rather derogates from the merit of her conduct in any case; and though she is abominably ill-treated by almost everybody, one’s pity for her never comes very near to love.

Towards Lovelace, on the other hand, the orthodox attitude, with even greater uniformity, has been shocked, or sometimes even unshocked, admiration.  Hazlitt went into frequently quoted raptures over the “regality” of his character:  and though to approve of him as a man would only be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion seems to have gone various lengths in the same direction.  There have, however, been a few dissenters:  and I venture to join myself to them in the very dissidence of their dissent.