his best to evade the necessity; he couples all his
virtuous heroes with friendly confidants, who relieve the virtuous
heroes of the tiresome task of self-adulation; he supplies the heroes
themselves with elaborate reasons for overcoming their modesty, and
makes them apologise profusely for the unwelcome task. Still, ingenious
as his expedients may be, and willing as we are to make allowance for
the necessities of his task, we cannot quite free ourselves from an
unpleasant suspicion as to the simplicity of his characters. 'Clarissa'
is comparatively free from this fault, though Clarissa takes a
questionable pleasure in uttering the finest sentiments and posing
herself as a model of virtue. But in 'Sir Charles Grandison' the
fulsome interchange of flattery becomes offensive even in fiction. The
virtuous characters give and receive an amount of eulogy enough to turn
the strongest stomachs. How amiable is A! says B; how virtuous is C, and
how marvellously witty is D! And then A, C, and D go through the same
performance, adding a proper compliment to B in place of the exclamation
appropriate to themselves. The only parallel in modern times is to be
found at some of the public dinners, where every man proposes his
neighbour's health with a tacit understanding that he is himself to
furnish the text for a similar oration. But then at dinners people have
the excuse of a state of modified sobriety.

This fault is, as we have said, aggravated by the epistolary method.
That method makes it necessary that each person should display his or
her own virtues, as in an exhibition of gymnastics the performers walk
round and show their muscles. But the fault lies a good deal deeper.
Every writer, consciously or unconsciously, puts himself into his
novels, and exhibits his own character even more distinctly than that of
his heroes. And Richardson, the head of a little circle of conscientious
admirers of each other's virtues, could not but reproduce on a different
scale the tone of his own society. The Grandisons, and the families of
Miss Byron and Clementina, merely repeat a practice with which he was
tolerably familiar at home; whilst his characters represent to some
extent the idealised Richardson himself;--and this leads us to the most
essential characteristic of his novels. The greatest woman in France,
according to Napoleon's brutal remark, was the woman who had the most
children. In a different sense, the saying may pass for truth. Th