f one has read it three or four times, provided that a fairly long
period has elapsed since the last reading, and that the novels of the
preceding age are fairly--and freshly--familiar. The thing has been in
fact done--with unexpected but not in the least deliberate or suspicious
success--by the present writer, who has read the book after an interval
of some fifteen years and just after reading (in some cases again, in
some for the first time) most of the works noticed in the preceding
chapter. The difference of "the new species of writing" (one is reminded
of the description of Spenser as "the new poet") is almost startling:
and of a kind which Richardson pretty certainly did not fully apprehend
when he used the phrase. In order to appreciate it, one must not only
leave out the two last volumes (which, as has been said, the first
readers had not before them at all, and had better never have had) but
also the second, or great part of it, which they would only have reached
after they had been half whetted, half satiated, and wholly bribed, by
the first. The defects of this later part and indeed of the first itself
will be duly noticed presently. Let it be to us, for the moment, the
story of Pamela up to and including "Mr. B.'s" repentance and amendment
of mind: and the "difference" of this story, which fills some hundred
and twenty or thirty closely printed, double columned, royal octavo
pages in the "Ballantyne Novels," is (despite the awkwardness of such a
form for the enjoyment of a novel) almost astounding.

To begin with, the novel-attractions are presented with a completeness
which, as has been pointed out in the last chapter, is almost entirely
lacking before. There is, of course, not very much plot, in the martinet
sense of that word: there never was in Richardson, despite his immense
apparatus and elaboration. The story is not knotted and unknotted; the
wheel does not come full circle on itself; it merely runs along
pleasantly till it is time for it to stop, and it stops rather abruptly.
The siege of Pamela's virtue ends merely because the besieger is tired
of assaults which fail, and of offering dishonourable terms of
capitulation which are rejected: because he prefers peace and alliance.
But such as it is, it is told with a spirit which must have been
surprising enough to its readers, and which makes it, I confess, seem to
me now much the best _story_ in Richardson. The various alarums and
excursions of the sie