are calculated for the infinite
advantage of the reader."[81] There are sermons in Richardson, so much
so that it might rather be said that novels are to be noticed in
Richardson's magnificent series of sermons. This is the way he himself
would have spoken. Did he not write to Lady Bradsaigh, while forwarding
her the last volumes of "Clarissa": "Be pleased ... to honour these
volumes with a place with your Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, with your
Practice of piety, and Nelson's Fasts and Festivals, not as being worthy
of such company, but that they may have a chance of being dipt into
thirty years hence. For I persuade myself, they will not be found
utterly unworthy of such a chance, since they appear in the humble guise
of novel, only by the way of accommodation to the manners and taste of
an age overwhelmed with luxury, and abandoned to sound and
senselessness."[82] There are some sermons in Fielding, many in Dickens,
not a few in George Eliot, and even in Thackeray. Splendid they are,
most eloquent, most admirable in their kind, most beneficial in their
way; but there is no denying that sermons they are. Unfortunately for
Lyly, what formerly constituted the attraction of "Euphues," and hid the
sermon's bitterness, makes it to-day ridiculous and even odious: it is
the style. Let us forget for a moment his unicorns and his scorpions;
taken in himself, his hero deserves attention, because he is the
ancestor in direct line of Grandison, of Lord Orville, of Lord Colambre,
and of all the sermonizing lords, and lords of good example, that
England owed to the success of Richardson.

[Illustration: THE GREAT SEA SERPENT, ACCORDING TO TOPSELL, 1608.]

Euphues is a young Athenian, a contemporary not of Pericles, but of
Lyly, who goes to Naples, thence to England, to study men and
governments. Grave with that gravity peculiar to lay preachers,
well-informed on every subject, even on his own merits, assured by his
conscience that in making mankind sharer in his illumination, he will
assure their salvation, he addresses moral epistles to his fellow men to
guide them through life. Omniscient like the inheritors of his vein whom
we have heard since, he instructs the world in the truth about marriage,
travel, religion. He anticipates, in his discourses concerning
aristocracy, the philosophical ideas of "Milord Edouard," of "Nouvelle
Heloise" fame; he treats of love with the wisdom of Grandison, and of
the bringing up of children w