he and Sir Charles are married.

Miss Jervois, who is Richardson's idea of a _jeune personne bien elevee_,
is a compound of tears, of servility, and of undisguised love for her
guardian. She is much more like the heroine of a French drama than an
English girl of fourteen, and I dread to think what effect she would have
on a free-born American! Harriet, as you know, is not quite hopeless at
first, but the descent is easy, and, in the end, we quite agree with all
the admiring circle, that they were made for each other. They were
equally pompous, and used stilts of equal height.

"Sir Charles Grandison" was the last, the most socially ambitious, and
much the worst of Richardson's novel's. Smollett came to his best in his
last, "Humphrey Clinker." Fielding sobered down into the kind excellence
of _his_ last, "Amelia." Neither had been flattered and coddled by
literary ladies, like Richardson. What of "Pamela" and "Clarissa"? May
a maiden read the book that the young lady studied over Charles Lamb's
shoulder? Well, I think, as you have now passed your quarter of a
century, it would do you no harm to read the other two, which are
infinitely better than "Sir Charles." The worthy Miss Byron, aged only
twenty, indeed, writes to her Lucy to remind her that "their grandmother
had told them twenty and twenty frightful stories of the vile enterprises
of men against innocent creatures," and that they can both "call to mind
stories which had ended much worse than hers (the affair with Sir
Hargrave Pollexfen) had done."

Grandmothers now choose other topics of conversation for their
descendants, but in those old days when sedan-chairs made _enlevements_
so very easy, it was considered necessary to caution girls against all
the possible wiles of man. Even little boys, strange as it may sound,
were given "Pamela" to read after the Bible. More than this, one small
creature, Harry Campbell by name, so young that he always spoke of
himself as "little Harry," obtained the book by stealth in his guardian's
house, and never stopped till he finished it. When Richardson, on being
told of this, sent him a copy for his own, he nearly went out of his
senses with delight.

Of course you know the outline of Pamela's story. How at eleven she was
taken and educated by a lady, who on her death, when Pamela was sixteen,
left her not only more beautiful, but more accomplished than any girl of
her years. How Pamela's young master fell in