hey always take their
solid three meals, with a liberal intercalation of dishes of tea and
chocolate. Miss Harlowe, we must add, knew Latin, although her
quotations of classical authors are generally taken from translations.
Her successor, Miss Byron, was not allowed this accomplishment,
Richardson's doubts of its suitability to ladies having apparently
gathered strength in the interval. Notwithstanding this one audacious
excursion into the regions of manly knowledge, Miss Harlowe appears to
us as, in the main, a healthy, sensible country girl, with sound sense,
the highest respect for decorum, and an exaggerated regard for
constituted, especially paternal, authority. We cannot expect, from her,
any of the outbreaks against the laws of society customary with George
Sand's heroines. If she had changed places with Maggie Tulliver, she
would have accepted the society of the 'Mill on the Floss' with perfect
contentment, respected all the family of aunts and uncles, and never
repined against the tyranny of her brother Tom. She would have been
conscious of no vague imaginative yearnings, nor have beaten herself
against the narrow bars of stolid custom. She would have laid up a vast
store of linen, and walked thankfully in the path chalked out for her.
Certainly she would never have run away with Mr. Stephen Guest without
tyranny of a much more tangible kind than that which acts only through
the finer spiritual tissues. When Clarissa went off with Lovelace, it
was not because she had unsatisfied aspirations after a higher order of
life, but because she had been locked up in her room, as a solitary
prisoner, and her family had tried to force her into marriage with a man
whom she had excellent reasons for hating and despising. The worst point
about Clarissa is one which was keenly noticed by Johnson. There is
always something, he said, which she prefers to truth. She is a little
too anxious to keep up appearances, and we desire to see more of the
natural woman.

Yet the long tragedy in which Clarissa is the victim is not the less
affecting because the torments are of an intelligible kind, and require
no highly-strung sensibility to give them keenness. The heroine is first
bullied and then deserted by her family, cut off from the friends who
have a desire to help her, and handed over to the power of an
unscrupulous libertine. When she dies of a broken heart, the most
callous and prosaic of readers must feel that it is the only re