s peep into the
past. Richardson sits in his 'usual morning dress,' a kind of brown
dressing-gown with a skull-cap on his head, filling the chair with his
plump little body, and raising one foot (or has the artist found
difficulties in planting both upon the ground?) to point his moral with
an emphatic stamp.

Many eminent men of his time were polite to Richardson after he had won
fame at the mature age of fifty. He was not the man to presume on his
position. He was 'very shy of obtruding himself on persons of
condition.' He never rose like Pope, whose origin was not very
dissimilar, to speak to princes and ministers as an equal. He was always
the obsequious and respectful shopkeeper. The great Warburton wrote a
letter to his 'good sir'--a phrase equivalent to the two fingers of a
dignified greeting--suggesting, in Pope's name and his own, a plan for
continuing 'Pamela.' She was to be the ingenuous young person shocked at
the conventionalities of good society. Richardson sensibly declined a
plan for which he was unfitted; and in 1747 Warburton condescended to
write a preface to 'Clarissa Harlowe,' pointing out (very
superfluously!) the nature of the intended moral. Warburton afterwards
took offence at a passage in the same book which he took to glance at
Pope; and Richardson was on friendly terms with two authors, Edwards, of
the 'Canons of Criticism,' and Aaron Hill, who were among the
multitudinous enemies of Warburton and his patron Pope. Hill's letters
in the correspondence are worth reading as illustrations of the old
moral of literary vanity. He expresses with unusual _naivete_ the
doctrine, so pleasant to the unsuccessful, that success means the
reverse of merit. Pope's fame was due to personal assiduities, and 'a
certain bladdery swell of management.' It is already passing away. He
does not speak from jealousy, for nobody ever courted fame 'with less
solicitude than I.' But for all that, there will come a time! He knows
it on a surer ground than vanity. Let us hope that this little salve to
self-esteem never lost its efficacy. Surely of all prayers the most
injudicious was that of Burns, that we might see ourselves as others see
us. What would become of us? Richardson, as we might expect, was highly
esteemed by Young of the 'Night Thoughts,' and by Johnson, to both of
whom he seems to have given substantial proofs of friendship. He wrote
the only number of the 'Rambler' which had a good sale, and helped
Johnson