declares on the appearance of "Sir Charles Grandison" that she
heartily despises Richardson, yet eagerly reads him--"nay, sobs
over his works in the most scandalous manner."

Richardson was the son of a carpenter and himself a respected
printer, who by cannily marrying the daughter of the man to whom
he was apprenticed, and by diligence in his vocation, rose to
prosperity, so that by 1754 he became Master of The Stationers'
Company and King's Printer, doing besides an excellent printing
business.

As a boy he had relieved the dumb anguish of serving maids by
the penning of their love letters; he seemed to have a knack at
this vicarious manner of love-making and when in the full
maturity of fifty years, certain London publishers requested him
to write for them a narrative which might stand as a model
letter writer from which country readers should know the right
tone, his early practice stood him in good stead. Using the
epistolary form into which he was to throw all his fiction, he
produced "Pamela," the first novel of analysis, in contrast with
the tale of adventure, of the English tongue. It is worth
remarking that Richardson wrote this story at an age when many
novelists have well-nigh completed their work; even as Defoe
published his masterpiece, "Robinson Crusoe," at fifty-eight.
But such forms as drama and fiction are the very ones where ripe
maturity, a long and varied experience with the world and a
trained hand in the technique of the craft, go for their full
value. A study of the chronology of novel-making will show that
more acknowledged masterpieces were written after forty than
before. Beside the eighteenth century examples one places George
Eliot, who wrote no fiction until she had nearly reached the
alleged dead-line of mental activity: Browning with his greatest
poem, "The Ring and the Book," published in his forty-eighth
year; Du Maurier turning to fiction at sixty, and De Morgan
still later. Fame came to Richardson then late in life, and
never man enjoyed it more. Ladies with literary leanings (and
the kind is independent of periods) used to drop into his place
beyond Temple Bar--for he was a bookseller as well as printer,
and printed and sold his own wares--to finger his volumes and
have a chat about poor Pamela or the naughty Lovelace or
impeccable Grandison. For how, in sooth, could they keep away or
avoid talking shop when they were bursting with the books just
read?

And much, too, did Ric