“worthy to be followed, in the most critical cases, by the modest virgin, the chaste bride, and the obliging wife.”  Moreover, all this is to be done, “without raising a single idea throughout the whole, that shall shock the exactest purity.”  Yet, “Pamela” contains not a few scenes likely to inflame the imagination, and its subject, kept continually before the reader’s mind, is the licentious pursuit of a young girl.  This story would not now do for a tract.  But it answered the purpose very well in the eighteenth century.  Richardson had no fear his book would give the youthful reader any new knowledge of evil, or that the long account of Pamela’s attempted seduction would shock the “exactest purity” of his time.  He simply described the dangers to which every attractive young woman was more or less subject by the prevailing looseness of morals, while, by the pathetic and resolute resistance of Pamela’s chastity, he undoubtedly enlisted the sympathies of his reader on the side of virtue.  The perusal of the book was recommended by Dr. Sherlock from the pulpit.  One critic declared that it would do more good than twenty volumes of sermons; another, that if all other books were to be burnt, “Pamela” and the Bible should be preserved.  A gentleman said that he would give it to his son as soon as he could read, that he might have an early impression of virtue.[164]

The moral of “Pamela” was virtue rewarded.  That of “Clarissa,” Richardson’s second novel, was virtue triumphant, even in disgrace and ruin.  The heroine, to escape the tyranny of her parents who wished to force her into a marriage she abhors, throws herself on the protection of a lover, the famous Lovelace, who, failing to seduce her by any other means, lures her into a brothel, and there violates her person while she is rendered insensible by opiates.  Lovelace offers to make reparation for his crime by marriage, but in refusing this offer, and in dying of a broken heart, Clarissa carries out the moral of the story.

Richardson was blamed for making the libertine hero, Lovelace, more attractive than was consistent with moral effect.  And to remedy this mistake, he undertook in “Sir Charles Grandison,” his last novel, to draw the portrait of a man of true honor; “acting uniformly well through a variety of trying scenes, because all his actions are regulated by one steady principle:  a man of religion and virtue; of liveliness and spirit; accomplished and agreeable; happy in himself, and a blessing to others.”  Sir Charles then is not a man, but a model.  “Pamela” and “Clarissa” remained virtuous through temptation and trial.  But Grandison is a good man because he has no inducement to be otherwise.  He can afford to be generous, because he is rich; he can afford to decline a duel, his reputation for skill in swordsmanship is so well established that he runs no danger of being called a coward; he is free from licentiousness, because his passions are under perfect control.  The name