llow
than he might generally seem. Sterne is the most difficult of the four
to characterise fairly, because of the unlucky revelations to which we
possess no parallel in the case of the other three, and which, if we had
them, might probably alter our estimates of a good many now well reputed
people. It is perhaps enough to say that his letters contain many good
traits as well as some bad ones; that his unlucky portrait, with its
combination of leer and sneer, is probably responsible for much; and
that the parts which, as we shall see further, he chose to play, of
extravagant humorist and extravagant sentimentalist, not only almost
necessitate attitudes which may easily become offensive in the playing,
but are very likely, in practice, to communicate something apparently
not natural and unattractive to the player.

But enough of the workers, though not too much in the case of such
remarkable contemporary exponents of a new kind of Human Comedy: let us
go to the work.

In the long "History of the Unexpected," thick-strewn as it is with
curiosities, there are few things odder than the appearance and the
sequels of _Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded_, which, in circumstances to be
noted presently, is said to have been begun on November 12, 1739, was
finished (as far as the first part goes) exactly two months later, and
(there being, in the case of the author's business, no obstacle of the
kind that has frequently beset the appearance of greater works) was
published later in the year 1740. That author was over fifty years old:
though he had had much to do with ushering literature into the world, he
had never attempted to produce it; he belonged to a class which was apt
to regard _belles lettres_ with profound suspicion; and his experiences,
both in literature itself and in life, had been necessarily of the most
limited kind. But there were certain counterbalancing facts to be taken
into consideration which, though they can hardly be said to be _causes_
of the marvel--the cause was the Hour, which hit, as it listed, on the
Man--were a little more than accidental occasions of it. Richardson, as
we see from his work, must have been a rather careful student of such
novels as there were. The name of his first heroine, with the
essentially English throwing back of the accent added, is the same as
that of one of Sidney's heroines in the _Arcadia_, which had been not
long before modernised for eighteenth-century reading by a certain Mrs.