fee-house talk, but
the moralist, who looks indeed at actual life, but stands well apart
and knows many hours of melancholy and hypochondria. He preaches the
morality of his time--the morality of Richardson and Young--only
tempered by a hearty contempt for cant, sentimentalism, and all
unreality, and expressing his deeper and stronger nature. The style,
however acquired, has the idiosyncrasy of the man himself; but I shall
have to speak of the Johnsonian view in the next period, when he became
the acknowledged literary dictator and expressed one main tendency of
the period.

Meanwhile Richardson, as Johnson put it, had been teaching the passions
to move at the command of virtue. In other words, Richardson had
discovered an incomparably more effective way of preaching a popular
sermon. He had begun, as we know, by writing a series of edifying
letters to young women; and expounded the same method in _Pamela_, and
afterwards in the famous _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_.
All his books are deliberate attempts to embody his ideal in model
representatives of the society of his day. He might have taken a
suggestion from Bunyan; who besides his great religious allegory and the
curious life of _Mr. Badman_, couched a moral lesson in a description
of the actual tradesman of his time. Allegory was now to be supplanted
by fiction. The man was to take the place of the personified virtue and
vice. Defoe had already shown the power of downright realistic
storytelling; and Richardson perhaps learnt something from him when he
was drawing his minute and vivid portraits of the people who might at
any rate pass for being realities. I must take for granted that
Richardson was a man of genius, without adding a word as to its precise
quality. I need only repeat one familiar remark. Richardson was a
typical tradesman of the period; he was the industrious apprentice who
marries his master's daughter; he lived between Hammersmith and
Salisbury Court as a thorough middle-class cockney, and had not an idea
beyond those common to his class; he accepted the ordinary creeds and
conventions; he looked upon freethinkers with such horror that he will
not allow even his worst villains to be religious sceptics; he shares
the profound reverence of the shopkeepers for the upper classes who are
his customers, and he rewards virtue with a coach and six. And yet this
mild little man, with the very narrowest intellectual limitations,
writes a bo