love with her, persecuted
her, and after moving adventures of all kinds, being convinced that she
was not to be overcome, married her, and they lived happy, with one brief
exception, ever after. The proper frame of mind in which to read
"Pamela" is to consider it in the light of an historical joke.

The absolute want of dignity that is almost as marked a characteristic in
Richardson as his lack of humour, shows itself again and again. After
all, Mr. B. would never have married Pamela if he could have persuaded
her to live with him in any other way; so the cringing gratitude
expressed by Pamela and her parents to the "good gentleman" and the "dear
obliger" is only revolting. No woman with any delicacy of feeling could
have sat complacently at her own table, while her husband entertained his
company with prolonged and minute accounts of his attempts on her virtue.
Can you fancy Fielding composing such a scene, Fielding whom Richardson
scouts as a profligate? It is impossible not to laugh at the bare idea;
and no less funny are Pamela's poetical flights, especially when, like
Hamilton of Bangour in exile, she paraphrases the paraphrase of the 137th
Psalm, about her captivity in Lincolnshire. All through one has to
remind one's self perpetually that Pamela must not be expected to behave
like a lady, and that if her father had done as he ought and removed her
from her place when she first told him of her uneasiness, there would
have been no story at all, and some other book would have had to rank in
the opinion of Richardson's adorers "next to the Bible."

Still, whatever may have to be said as to Richardson's subjects, he is
never coarse in his treatment of them. The pursuit of Pamela by Mr. B.,
or of Clarissa by Lovelace, through eight volumes, may weary; it does not
corrupt. No man or maid on earth could lay it to his charge that he or
she had been corrupted by these books, while no man on earth could read
"Clarissa" without being touched by the noble ending. If "Clarissa" had
never been written we should have said that the good-natured, fussy,
essentially middle-class bookseller, Samuel Richardson, was unable to
draw a lady; and it is curious to see how Clarissa stands out, not only
among Richardson's female characters, but among the female characters of
all time; eminent she is for purity of soul, and nobility of feeling.
There is no cant about her anywhere, no effort to pose or to strain after
a state of mind w