g rapidly, wrote in
three months his famous story of _Pamela_.

All Richardson's novels are written in what Mrs. Barbauld has
ingeniously described as "the most natural and the least probable way of
telling a story," namely, in consecutive letters. The famous heroine of
his first book is a young girl, Pamela Andrews, who describes in letters
to her father and mother what goes on in the house of a lady with whom
she had lived as maid, and who is just dead when the story opens. The
son of Pamela's late mistress, a Mr. B.--it was Fielding who wickedly
enlarged the name to Booby--becomes enamoured of her charms, and takes
every mean advantage of her defenceless position; but, fortunately,
Pamela is not more virtuous than astute, and after various agonies,
which culminate in her thinking of drowning herself in a pond, she
brings her admirer to terms, and is discovered to us at last as the
rapturous though still humble Mrs. B. There are all sorts of faults to
be found with this crude book. The hero is a rascal, who comes to a good
end, not because he has deserved to do so, but because his clever wife
has angled for him with her beauty, and has landed him at last, like an
exhausted salmon.

So long as Pamela is merely innocent and frightened, she is charming,
but her character ceases to be sympathetic as she grows conscious of the
value of her charms, and even the lax morality of the day was shocked at
the craft of her latest manoeuvres. But all the world went mad with
pleasure over the book. What we now regard as tedious and prolix was
looked upon as so much linked sweetness long drawn out. The fat printer
had invented a new thing, and inaugurated a fresh order of genius. For
the first time the public was invited, by a master of the movements of
the heart, to be present at the dissection of that fascinating organ,
and the operator could not be leisurely enough, could not be minute
enough, for his breathless and enraptured audience.

In France, for some ten years past there had been writers--Crebillon,
Marivaux, Prevost--who had essayed this delicate analysis of emotion,
but these men were the first to admit the superiority of their rough
English rival. In _Marianne_, where the heroine tells her own story,
which somewhat resembles that of Pamela, the French novelist produced a
very refined study of emotion, which will probably be one day more
largely read than it now is, and which should be looked through by every
student o