ty is of course ineffectual, and
produces some artistic blemishes. The direct exhortations to his
readers to be good are still more annoying; no human being can long
endure a mixture of preaching and story-telling. For Heaven's sake, we
exclaim, tell us what happens to Clarissa, and don't stop to prove that
honesty is the best policy! In a wider sense, however, the seriousness
of Richardson's purpose is of high value. He is so keenly in earnest, so
profoundly interested about his characters, so determined to make us
enter into their motives, that we cannot help being carried away; if he
never spares an opportunity of giving us a lecture, at least his zeal in
setting forth an example never flags for an instant. The effort to give
us an ideally perfect character seems to stimulate his imagination, and
leads to a certain intensity of realisation which we are apt to miss in
the purposeless school of novelists. He is always, as it were, writing
at high-pressure and under a sense of responsibility.

The method which he adopts lends itself very conveniently to heighten
this effect. Richardson's feminine delight in letter-writing was, as we
have seen, the immediate cause of his plunge into authorship.
Richardson's novels, indeed, are not so much novels put for convenience
under the form of letters, as letters expanded till they become novels.
A genuine novelist who should put his work into the unnatural shape of a
correspondence would probably find it a very awkward expedient; but
Richardson gradually worked up to the novel from the conception of a
collection of letters; and his method, therefore, came spontaneously to
him. He started from the plan of writing letters to illustrate a certain
point of morality, and to make them more effective attributed them to a
fictitious character. The result was the gigantic tract called
'Pamela'--distinctly the worst of his works--of which it is enough to
say at present that it succeeds neither in being moral nor in amusing.
It shows, however, a truly amazing fertility in a specially feminine
art. We have all suffered from the propensity of some female minds (the
causes of which we will not attempt to analyse) for pouring forth
indefinite floods of correspondence. We know the heartless fashion in
which some ladies, even in these days of penny postage, will fill a
sheet of note-paper and proceed to cross their writing till the page
becomes a chequer-work of unintelligible hieroglyphics. But we