ho would make a jest
of them and of their whole sex.

Two letters, however, by way of accommodation, are inserted in this
edition, which perhaps will give Mr. Hickman's character some heightening
with such ladies as love spirit in a man; and had rather suffer by it,
than not meet with it.--

Women, born to be controul'd,
Stoop to the forward and the bold,

Says Waller--and Lovelace too!

Some have wished that the story had been told in the usual narrative way
of telling stories designed to amuse and divert, and not in letters
written by the respective persons whose history is given in them. The
author thinks he ought not to prescribe to the taste of others; but
imagined himself at liberty to follow his own. He perhaps mistrusted his
talents for the narrative kind of writing. He had the good fortune to
succeed in the epistolary way once before. A story in which so many
persons were concerned either principally or collaterally, and of
characters and dispositions so various, carried on with tolerable
connection and perspicuity, in a series of letters from different
persons, without the aid of digressions and episodes foreign to the
principal end and design, he thought had novelty to be pleaded for it;
and that, in the present age, he supposed would not be a slight
recommendation.

Besides what has been said above, and in the Preface, on this head, the
following opinion of an ingenious and candid foreigner, on this manner of
writing, may not be improperly inserted here.

'The method which the author had pursued in the History of Clarissa, is
the same as in the Life of Pamela: both are related in familiar letters
by the parties themselves, at the very time in which the events happened:
and this method has given the author great advantages, which he could not
have drawn from any other species of narration. The minute particulars
of events, the sentiments and conversation of the parties, are, upon this
plan, exhibited with all the warmth and spirit that the passion supposed
to be predominant at the very time could produce, and with all the
distinguishing characteristics which memory can supply in a history of
recent transactions.

'Romances in general, and Marivaux's amongst others, are wholly
improbable; because they suppose the History to be written after the
series of events is closed by the catastrophe: a circumstance which
implies a strength of memory beyond all example and probability in the