psychology" as it may be called, which
is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other
things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely
higher degree than had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderot
are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only an
exaggeration of the truth. On the comic side he was weak: and he made a
most unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on young
ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm--Miss Darnford, Miss
Howe, Charlotte Grandison--who are by no means particularly comic and
who are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in
the _bourgeois_ kind, he had no small command, and in the middle
business--in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic--he
was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breaking
lengthiness is not _mere_ verbosity: it comes partly from the artist's
natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still
more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. As for
the unhealthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and not
unjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the result of
imperfect temperament and breeding: but it is also as closely connected
with his very method as are the merits thereof. You cannot "consider so
curiously" without considering too curiously. The drawbacks of his work
are obvious, and they were likely to be, and were, exaggerated. But they
might be avoided and the merits kept: nor is it too much to say that the
triumphs of the English novel in the last century have been not a little
due to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the other.

It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and disobliging
to lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatest
of Richardson's works is his successor, caricaturist, and
superior--Fielding. When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared,
the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a not
very young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not very
good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little work
at the Bar, besides living, at least till his marriage and it may be
feared later, an exceedingly "rackety" life. It is not improbable,
though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention to
prose fiction of a kind. For, though the _Miscellanies