They have
the romantic air of a pure fiction, with the literal minuteness of a
common diary. The author had the strongest matter-of-fact imagination that
ever existed, and wrote the oddest mixture of poetry and prose. He does
not appear to have taken advantage of anything in actual nature, from one
end of his works to the other; and yet, throughout all his works,
voluminous as they are--(and this, to be sure, is one reason why they are
so,)--he sets about describing every object and transaction, as if the
whole had been given in on evidence by an eye-witness. This kind of high
finishing from imagination is an anomaly in the history of human genius;
and, certainly, nothing so fine was ever produced by the same accumulation
of minute parts. There is not the least distraction, the least
forgetfulness of the end: every circumstance is made to tell. I cannot
agree that this exactness of detail produces heaviness; on the contrary,
it gives an appearance of truth, and a positive interest to the story; and
we listen with the same attention as we should to the particulars of a
confidential communication. I at one time used to think some parts of Sir
Charles Grandison rather trifling and tedious, especially the long
description of Miss Harriet Byron's wedding-clothes, till I was told of
two young ladies who had severally copied out the whole of that very
description for their own private gratification. After that, I could not
blame the author.

The effect of reading this work is like an increase of kindred. You find
yourself all of a sudden introduced into the midst of a large family, with
aunts and cousins to the third and fourth generation, and grandmothers
both by the father's and mother's side;--and a very odd set of people they
are, but people whose real existence and personal identity you can no more
dispute than your own senses, for you see and hear all that they do or
say. What is still more extraordinary, all this extreme elaborateness in
working out the story, seems to have cost the author nothing; for it is
said, that the published works are mere abridgments. I have heard (though
this I suspect must be a pleasant exaggeration) that Sir Charles Grandison
was originally written in eight and twenty volumes.

Pamela is the first of Richardson's productions, and the very child of his
brain. Taking the general idea of the character of a modest and beautiful
country girl, and of the ordinary situation in which she is placed,