E, ETC., FROM A PLAN PUBLISHED BY
RALPH AGGAS, 1563.]

Samuel Richardson, the author of "Pamela" and "Clarissa," was the son of
a Derbyshire joiner. He was born in 1689, and died in 1761. Apprenticed
to a London printer, he rose by steady industry and prudence to be the
manager of a large business, printer of the Journals of the House of
Commons, Master of the Stationers' Company, and part-printer to the
king. In 1741, at the age of fifty-two, publishers urging the thriving
citizen to write them a book of moral letters, Richardson produced
"Pamela," a novel which ran through five editions the first year, and
became the rage of the town. Ladies carried the precious volumes to
Ranelagh, and held them up in smiling triumph to each other. Pope
praised the novel as more useful than twenty volumes of sermons, and Dr.
Sherlock gravely recommended it from the pulpit. In 1749 Richardson
wrote "Clarissa Harlowe," his most perfect work, and in 1753 his
somewhat tedious "Sir Charles Grandison" (7 vols.). In "Pamela" he drew
a servant, whom her master attempts to seduce and eventually marries,
but in "Clarissa" the heroine, after harrowing misfortunes, dies
unrewarded. Richardson had always a moral end in view. He hated vice and
honoured virtue, but he is too often prolix and wearisome. He wished to
write novels that should wean the young from the foolish romances of
his day. In "Pamela" he rewarded struggling virtue; in "Clarissa" he
painted the cruel selfishness of vice; in "Sir Charles" he tried to
represent the perfect Christian gentleman. Coleridge said that to read
Fielding after Richardson was like emerging from a sick room, heated by
stoves into an open lawn on a breezy May morning. Richardson, indeed,
wrote more for women than men. Fielding was coarser, but more manly; he
had humour, but no moral purpose at all. The natural result was that
Fielding and his set looked on Richardson as a grave, dull, respectable
old prig; Richardson on Fielding as a low rake, who wrote like a man who
had been an ostler born in a stable, or a runner in a sponging-house.
"The virtues of Fielding's heroes," the vain old printer used to say to
his feminine clique, "are the vices of a truly good man."

Dr. Johnson, who had been befriended by Richardson, was never tired of
depreciating Fielding and crying up the author of "Pamela." "Sir," he
used to thunder out, "there is as much difference between the two as
between a man who knows how a watch is