the Pulpit has lost great part of
its weight, and the Clergy are considered as a body of _interested_ men,
the Author thought he should be able to answer it to his own heart, be
the success what it would, if he threw in his mite towards introducing a
Reformation so much wanted: And he imagined, that if in an age given up
to diversion and entertainment, he could _steal in_, as may be said, and
investigate the great doctrines of Christianity under the fashionable
guise of an amusement; he should be most likely to serve his purpose;
remembring that of the Poet:

"_A verse may find him who a sermon flies,
"And turn delight into a sacrifice._

"He was resolved therefore to attempt something that never yet had been
done. He considered, that the Tragic poets have as seldom made their
heroes true objects of pity, as the Comic theirs laudable ones of
imitation: And still more rarely have made them in their deaths look
forward to a _future Hope_. And thus, when they die, they seem totally
to perish. Death, in such instances, must appear terrible. It must be
considered as the greatest evil. But why is Death set in shocking
lights, when it is the universal lot?

"He has indeed thought fit to paint the death of the wicked as terrible
as he could paint it. But he has endeavoured to draw that of the good in
such an amiable manner, that the very Balaams of the world should not
forbear to wish that their latter end might be like that of the Heroine.

"And after all, what is the _poetical justice_ so much contended for by
some, as the generality of writers have managed it," but another sort of
dispensation than that with which God, by Revelation, teaches us, He has
thought fit to exercise mankind; whom placing here only in a state of
probation, he hath so intermingled good and evil, as to necessitate us
to look forward for a more equal dispensation of both.

The author of the History (or rather Dramatic Narrative) of Clarissa, is
therefore well justified by the _Christian System_, in deferring to
extricate suffering Virtue to the time in which it will meet with the
_Completion_ of its Reward.

But not absolutely to shelter the conduct observed in it under the
sanction of Religion [an authority perhaps not of the greatest weight
with some of our modern critics] it must be observed, that the author is
justified in its Catastrophe by the greatest master of reason, and the
best judge of composition, that ever lived. The learned Re