y is full
of falsehoods, and that your romance is full of truths. History
paints a few individuals; you paint the human race. History sets
down to its few individuals what they have neither said nor done;
whatever you set down to man, he has both said and done.... No; I
say that history is often a bad novel; and the novel, as you have
handled it, is good history. O painter of nature, 'tis you who are
never false!

"You accuse Richardson of being long! You must have forgotten how
much trouble, pains, busy movement, it costs to bring the smallest
undertaking to a good issue,--to end a suit, to settle a marriage,
to bring about a reconciliation. Think of these details what you
please, but for me they will be full of interest if they are only
true, if they bring out the passions, if they display character.
They are common, you say; it is all what one sees every day. You
are mistaken; 'tis what passes every day before your eyes, and what
you never see."

In Richardson's work, he says, as in the world, men are divided into two
classes, those who enjoy and those who suffer, and it is always to the
latter that he draws the mind of the reader. It is due to Richardson, he
cries, "if I have loved my fellow-creatures better, and loved my duties
better; if I have never felt anything but pity for the bad; if I have
conceived a deeper compassion for the unfortunate, more veneration for
the good, more circumspection in the use of present things, more
indifference about future things, more contempt for life, more love for
virtue." The works of Richardson are his touch-stone; those who do not
love them, stand judged and condemned in his eyes. Yet in the midst of
this tumult of admiration Diderot admits that the number of readers who
will feel all their value can never be great; it requires too severe a
taste, and then the variety of events is such, relations are so
multiplied, the management of them is so complicated, there are so many
things arranged, so many personages! "O Richardson; if thou hast not
enjoyed in thy lifetime all the reputation of thy deserts, how great
wilt thou be to our grandchildren when they see thee from the distance
at which we now view Homer! Then who will there be with daring enough to
strike out a line of thy sublime work?"[10] Yet of the very moderate
number of living persons who have ever read _Clarissa Harlowe_, it would
be sa