RICHARDSON.—­Samuel Richardson, who, notwithstanding the peculiar merits of Defoe, must be called the Father of Modern Prose Fiction, was born in Derbyshire, in 1689.  The personal events of his life are few and uninteresting.  A carpenter’s son, he had but little schooling, and owed everything to his own exertions.  Apprenticed to a printer in London, at the age of fifteen, he labored assiduously at his trade, and it rewarded him with fortune:  he became, in turn, printer of the Journals of the House of Commons, Master of the Stationers’ Company, and Printer to the King.  While young, he had been the confidant of three young women, and had written or corrected their love-letters for them.  He seems to have had great fluency in letter-writing; and being solicited by a publisher to write a series of familiar letters on the principal concerns of life, which might be used as models,—­a sort of “Easy Letter-Writer,”—­he began the task, but, changing his plan, he wrote a story in a series of letters.  The first volume was published in 1741, and was no less a work than Pamela.  The author was then fifty years old; and he presents in this work a matured judgment concerning the people and customs of the day,—­the printer’s notions of the social condition of England,—­shrewd, clever, and defective.

Wearied as the world had been by what Sir Walter Scott calls the “huge folios of inanity” which had preceded him, the work was hailed with delight.  There was a little affectation; but the sentiment was moral and natural.  Ladies carried Pamela about in their rides and walks.  Pope, near his end, said it was a better moral teacher than sermons:  Sherlock recommended it from the pulpit.

PAMELA, AND OTHER NOVELS.—­Pamela is represented as a poor servant-maid, but beautiful and chaste, whose honor resists the attack of her dissolute master, and whose modesty and virtue overcome his evil nature.  Subdued and reclaimed by her chastity and her charms, he reforms, and marries her.  Some pictures which are rather warmly colored and indelicate in our day were quite in keeping with the taste of that time, and gave greater effect to the moral lesson assigned to be taught.

In his next work, Clarissa Harlowe, which appeared in 1749, he has drawn the picture of a perfect woman preserving her purity amid seductive gayeties, and suffering sorrows to which those of the Virgin Martyr are light.  We have, too, an excellent portraiture of a bold and wicked, but clever and gifted man—­Lovelace.

His third and last novel, Sir Charles Grandison, appeared in 1753.  The hero, Sir Charles, is the model of a Christian gentleman; but is, perhaps, too faultless for popular appreciation.

In his delineations of humbler natures,—­country girls like Pamela,—­Richardson is happiest:  in his descriptions of high life he has failed from ignorance.  He was not acquainted with the best society, and all his grandees are stilted, artificial, and affected; but even in this fault he is of value, for he shows us how men of his class at that time regarded the society of those above them.