To this the author of Clarissa replied by writing a long epistle deploring the pain he had given the “dear Ladies,” and minutely justifying his foregone conclusions from the expressions they had used. He refers to Fielding again as “a very indelicate, a very impetuous, an unyielding-spirited Man;” and he also trusts to be able to “bestow a Reading” on Tom Jones; but by a letter from Lady Bradshaigh, printed in Barbauld, and dated December 1749, it seems that even at that date he had not, or pretended he had not, yet done so. In another of the unpublished South Kensington letters, from a Mr. Solomon Lowe, occurs the following:—“I do not doubt”—says the writer—“but all Europe will ring of it [Clarissa]: when a Cracker, that was some thous’d hours a-com-posing, [Footnote: Vide Tom Jones, Book xi. chap. i.] will no longer be heard, or talkt-of.” Richardson, with business-like precision, has gravely docketed this in his own handwriting,—“Cracker, T. Jones.”
It is unfortunate for Mr. Lowe’s reputation as a prophet that, after more than one hundred and thirty years, this ephemeral firework, as he deemed it, should still be sparkling with undiminished brilliancy, and to judge by recent editions, is selling as vigorously as ever. From the days when Lady Mary wrote “Ne plus ultra“ in her own copy, and La Harpe called it le premier roman du monde, (a phrase which, by the way, De Musset applies to Clarissa), it has come down to us with an almost universal accompaniment of praise. Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,—have all left their admiration on record,— to say nothing of professional critics innumerable. As may be seen from the British Museum Catalogue, it has been translated into French,
