of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes.” Its author, Samuel Richardson, was a middle-aged London printer, a vegetarian and water-drinker, a worthy, domesticated, fussy, and highly-nervous little man. Delighting in female society, and accustomed to act as confidant and amanuensis for the young women of his acquaintance, it had been suggested to him by some bookseller friends that he should prepare a “little volume of Letters, in a common style, on such subjects as might be of use to those country readers, who were unable to indite for themselves.” As Hogarth’s Conversation Pieces grew into his Progresses, so this project seems to have developed into Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. The necessity for some connecting link between the letters suggested a story, and the story chosen was founded upon the actual experiences of a young servant girl, who, after victoriously resisting all the attempts made by her master to seduce her, ultimately obliged him to marry her. It is needless to give any account here of the minute and deliberate way in which Richardson filled in this outline. As one of his critics, D’Alembert, has unanswerably said—“La, nature est bonne a imiter, mais non pas jusgu’a l’ennui”—and the author of Pamela has plainly disregarded this useful law. On the other hand, the tedium and elaboration of his style have tended, in these less leisurely days, to condemn his work to a neglect which it does not deserve. Few writers—it is a truism to say so—have excelled him in minute analysis of motive, and knowledge of the human heart. About the final morality of his heroine’s long-drawn defence of her chastity it may, however, be permitted to doubt; and,
