for his account of its fascinating influence. He knew it almost by heart. It is the finest work of fiction ever written in any language, said Sir James Mackintosh. He who was our first novelist in point of time, has in fact produced our first novel in point of rank. And not only is this opinion the final outcome of English, it is also the settled faith of French, criticism. The French are our chief rivals in prose fiction; and their opinion of Clarissa is summed up in the saying of Alfred de Musset, that it is the premier roman da monde. The French, indeed, have been more unanimous than ourselves in according the highest praise to Richardson. We in England have been quick to observe whatever was weak in the man or in his works. We have been tickled by the foibles of his vanity; we have been confounded by his notions of gentility; we have been bored by the goody-goodiness of his preaching; and in admiration for the rival who satirised the defects of his earliest work, we have kept back from him the full meed of praise to which he was entitled. If we have had among us men like Samuel Johnson who declared Clarissa to be "the first book in the world for the knowledge, it displays of the human heart;" we have also had men among us, admirers of his rival Fielding (the prose Homer of human nature, as he has been called by one of them), who
