s primarily with character and with the interaction of
characters upon one another, as developed by a regular plot. The first
English novelist, in the modern sense of the word, was Samuel
Richardson, a printer, who began authorship in his fiftieth year with
his _Pamela_, the story of a young servant girl, who resisted the
seductions of her master, and finally, as the reward of her virtue,
became his wife. _Clarissa Harlowe_, {206} 1748, was the tragical
history of a high spirited young lady, who being driven from home by
her family, because she refused to marry the suitor selected for her,
fell into the toils of Lovelace, an accomplished rake. After
struggling heroically against every form of artifice and violence, she
was at last drugged and ruined. She died of a broken heart, and
Lovelace, borne down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of
Clarissa. Sir _Charles Grandison_, 1753, was Richardson's portrait of
an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but
who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig. All of these novels
were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a
method which fitted Richardson's subjective cast of mind. He knew
little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal
character and produced a strong effect by minute, accumulated touches.
_Clarissa Harlowe_ is his masterpiece, though even in that the
situation is painfully prolonged, the heroine's virtue is
self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is something almost
ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself
out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the very moment
when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized, and driven nearly
mad. In Richardson's novels appears, for the first time, that
sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature. _Pamela_
was translated into French and German, and fell in with that current
{207} of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau's
_Nouvelle Heloise_, 1759, and Goethe's _Leiden des Jungen Werther_,
which set all the world a-weeping in 1774.

Coleridge said that to pass from Richardson's books to those of Henry
Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by
stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew _man_, but Fielding
knew _men_. The latter's first novel, _Joseph Andrews_, 1742, was
begun as a travesty of _Pamela_. The hero, a bro