While the novels of which we have been speaking were making their first appearance, there lived in Kent a charming young lady who went by the name of “the celebrated Miss Talbot.”  She had attained this distinction by her great cultivation.  She had studied astronomy and geography, was “mistress of French and Italian,” and knew a little Latin.  When she was only twenty years of age, the Dean of Canterbury spoke of her with high admiration.  Her acquaintance was eagerly sought by accomplished young ladies, and by none more successfully than “the learned” Miss Carter.  Both of these girls read the novels of the day, and fortunately recorded some of their opinions in the letters which passed between them.[182] “I want much to know,” wrote Miss Talbot, “whether you have yet condescended to read ‘Joseph Andrews.’” “I must thank you,” replied Miss Carter, “for the perfectly agreeable entertainment I have met in reading ‘Joseph Andrews.’  It contains such a surprising variety of nature, wit, morality, and good sense, as is scarcely to be met with in any one composition, and there is such a spirit of benevolence through the whole, as, I think renders it peculiarly charming,” Some years later the Bishop of Gloucester came to visit Miss Talbot’s family, and read “Amelia,” the young lady wrote, while he was nursing his cold by the fireside.  Miss Carter replied that “in favor of the bishop’s cold, his reading ‘Amelia’ in silence may be tolerated, but I am somewhat scandalized that, since he did not read it to you, you did not read it yourself.”  “The more I read ‘Tom Jones,’” wrote Miss Talbot, “the more I detest him, and admire Clarissa Harlowe,—­yet there are in it things that must touch and please every good heart, and probe to the quick many a bad one, and humor that it is impossible not to laugh at.”  “I am sorry,” replied Miss Carter, “to find you so outrageous about poor Tom Jones; he is no doubt an imperfect, but not a detestable character, with all that honesty, good-nature, and generosity.”  Miss Talbot, in a later letter, said that she had once heard a lady piously say to her son that she wished with all her heart he was like Tom Jones.[183] In 1747 “Clarissa” was read aloud at the palace of the Bishop of Oxford, Miss Talbot’s uncle.  “As for us,” she wrote, “we lived quite happy the whole time we were reading it, and we made that time as long as we could, too, for we only read it en famille, at set hours, and all the rest of the day we talked of it.  One can scarcely persuade one’s self that they are not real characters and living people.”  Even “Roderick Random” made part of the young ladies’ reading.  “It is a very strange and a very low book,” commented the Bishop’s celebrated niece, “though not without some characters in it, and, I believe, some very just, though very wretched descriptions.”

[Footnote 162:  Mrs. Barbauld’s “Life of Richardson,” vol. 1, p. 42.  Scott’s “Life of Richardson.”]

[Footnote 163:  Mrs. Barbauld’s “Life of Richardson,” vol. 1, p. 37.]