must have been gall and wormwood to him. Lady Bradshaigh, for instance, under her nom de guerre of “Belfour,” tells him that she is fatigued with the very name of the book, having met several young ladies who were for ever talking of their Tom Jones’s, “for so they call their favourites,” and that the gentlemen, on their side, had their Sophias, one having gone so far as to give that all-popular name to his “Dutch mastiff puppy.” But perhaps the best and freshest exhibition (for, as far as can be ascertained, it has never hitherto been made public) of Richardson’s attitude to his rival is to be found in a little group of letters in the Forster collection at South Kensington. The writers are Aaron Hill and his daughters; but the letters do not seem to have been known to Mrs. Barbauld, whose last communication from Hill is dated November 2, 1748. Nor are they to be found in Hill’s own Correspondence. The ladies, it appears, had visited Richardson at Salisbury Court in 1741, and were great admirers of Pamela, and the “divine Clarissa.” Some months after Tom Jones was published, Richardson (not yet having brought himself to read the book) had asked them to do so, and give him their opinion as to its merits. Thereupon Minerva and Astraea, who despite their names, and their description of themselves as “Girls of an untittering Disposition,” must have been very bright and lively young persons, began seriously “to lay their two wise heads together” and “hazard this Discovery of their Emptiness.” Having “with much ado got over some Reluctance, that was bred by a familiar coarseness in the Title,” they report “much (masqu’d) merit” in the “whole six volumes” —“a double merit, both of Head, and Heart.”
