performance. But when Miss Clara Thomson began to prepare her excellent and careful life of Richardson (1900), it became a part of her task to examine into this question. She found, first, that Richardson had himself ascribed Shamela to Fielding in a letter to “Mrs. Belfour” (Lady Bradshaigh); [Footnote: Correspondence, 1804, iv. p. 286.] and she was acute enough to discover, in the pamphlet itself, which appeared some months before Joseph Andrews, the suggestive, though not conclusive, fact that “Mr. B.” was provisionally transformed into “Mr. Booby.” When, in 1902, I was engaged upon my own Memoir of Richardson for the “Men of Letters” series, I was naturally indisposed to connect this undoubtedly clever, but also unquestionably gross production with Fielding, already “unjustly censured,” as he complained in the “Preface” to the Miscellanies of 1743, for much that he had never written (p. 72). But I must honestly confess that for the present it has been my ill-fortune to discover only corroborative evidence. To a document at South Kensington, in which Shamela is mentioned, I found that Richardson had appended, in the tremulous script of his old age:—“Written by Mr. H. Fielding”; and since the publication of my book on Richardson, Mr. Frederick Macmillan has drawn my attention to the fact that a letter written in July 1741, by Mr. T. Dampier, afterwards Sub-Master of Eton and Dean of Durham, to one of the Windhams, contains the following:— “The book that has made the greatest noise lately in the polite world is Pamela, a romance in low life. It is thought to contain such excellent precepts, that a learned divine at London [Footnote: This enables me to correct an error at p. 74. As Miss Thomson points out (Samuel Richardson, 1900, p. 31) it was Dr. Benjamin Slocock of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, and not Dr. Sherlock, who praised Pamela from the pulpit. The mistake seems to have originated with Jeffrey, and was freely repeated.] recommended it very strongly from the pulpit.... The dedication [of Conyers Middleton’s Life of Cicero] to Lord Hervey has been very justly and prettily ridiculed by Fielding in a dedication to a pamphlet called Shamela which he wrote to burlesque the fore-mentioned romance.” [Footnote: Hist. MSS. Commission, 12th Report, Appendix, Part IX., p. 204.] This
