Richardson succeeds in making Mr. B. tolerable, not to say
likable, is a proof of his power; that the reader really grows
fond of his heroine--especially perhaps in her daughterly
devotion to her humble family--speaks volumes for his grasp of
human nature and helps us to understand the effect of the story
upon contemporaneous readers. That effect was indeed remarkable.
Lady Mary, to quote her again, testifies that the book "met with
very extraordinary (and I think undeserved) success. It has been
translated into French and Italian; it was all the fashion at
Paris and Versailles and is still the joy of the chambermaids of
all nations." Again she writes, "it has been translated into
more languages than any modern performances I ever heard of." A
French dramatic version of it under the same title appeared
three years after the publication of the novel and a little
later Voltaire in his "Nanine" used the same motif. Lady Mary's
reference to chambermaids is significant; it points to the new
sympathy on the part of the novelist and the consequent new
audience which the modern Novel was to command; literally, all
classes and conditions of mankind were to become its patrons;
and as one result, the author, gaining his hundreds of thousands
of readers, was to free himself forever of the aristocratic
Patron, at whose door once on a time, he very humbly and
hungrily knelt for favor. To-day, the Patron is hydra-headed;
demos rules in literature as in life.

The sentimentality of this pioneer novel which now seems
old-fashioned and even absurd, expressed Queen Anne's day.
"Sensibility," as it was called, was a favorite idea in letters,
much affected, and later a kind of cult. A generation after
Pamela, in Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," weeping is unrestrained
in English fiction; the hero of that lachrymose tale incurred
all the dangers of influenza because of his inveterate tendency
toward damp emotional effects; he was perpetually dissolving in
"showers of tears." In fact, our novelists down to the memory of
living man gave way to their feelings with far more abandon than
is true of the present repressive period. One who reads Dickens'
"Nicholas Nickleby" with this in mind, will perhaps be surprised
to find how often the hero frankly indulges his grief; he cries
with a freedom that suggests a trait inherited from his mother
of moist memory. No doubt, there was abuse of this "sensibility"
in earlier fiction: but Richardson was com