softened or changed.  One, highly gratified with her lover’s fervor and vows of everlasting love, has said, when I have asked her direction, I cannot tell you what to write; but (her heart on her lips) you cannot write too kindly."[171] With such an apprenticeship, Richardson had come to possess a very delicate perception of character, and especially of female character.  There was a certain effeminacy in his own nature which made him understand women better than men.  His best creations are Pamela and Clarissa.  Lovelace and Grandison are drawn from the outside; they are less real and natural.  But Richardson leads his reader into the inmost recesses of his heroines’ hearts.  He is at home in describing the fears, the trials, and the final childlike rejoicings of Pamela.  He attains to a high tragic effect in the death of Clarissa, a scene which Sir James Mackintosh ranked with Hume’s description of the death of Mary Stuart.  In this power to touch the heart and to move the passions of his reader lay the charm of Richardson’s writing.  But to paint perfection, rather than to study nature, was his object in “Sir Charles Grandison,” and therefore that novel was less powerful in the author’s day, and is less interesting in ours than “Pamela” and “Clarissa.”  We no longer need the example of the pompous Sir Charles to dissuade us from indecent language and drunkenness in a lady’s drawing-room, and we can only laugh at the studied propriety of his faultless intercourse with Miss Byron: 

He kissed my hand with fervor, dropped down on one knee; again kissed it—­You have laid me, madam, under everlasting obligation; and will you permit me before I rise—­loveliest of women, will you permit me to beg an early day?—­

He clasped me in his; arms with an ardor—­that displeased me not on reflection.  But at the time startled me.  He then thanked me again on one knee.  I held out the hand he had not in his, with intent to raise him; for I could not speak.  He received it as a token of favor; kissed it with ardor; arose; again pressed my cheeks with his lips.  I was too much surprised to repulse him with anger; but was he not too free?  Am I a prude, my dear?

Restrain, check me, madam, whenever I seem to trespass on your goodness.  Yet how shall I forbear to wish you to hasten the day that shall make you wholly mine?  You will the rather allow me to wish it, as you will then be more than ever your own mistress; though you have always been generously left to a discretion that never was more deservedly trusted to.  Your will, madam, will ever comprehend mine.

The verisimilitude of Richardson’s novels, which is made so striking by his feminine attention to detail, may seem destroyed to modern readers by the apparent improbability of the narrative itself.  It appears strange that young girls like Pamela or Clarissa should be so entirely in the power of their seducers, that