understood, and through all the
stiffness, the stilted effect of manner and speech, and the
stifling conventions of the entourage, a sweet and charming
young woman in very piteous distress emerges to live in
affectionate memory. After all, no poor ideal of womanhood is
pictured in Clarissa. She is one of the heroines who are
unforgettable, dear. Mr. Howells, with his stern insistence on
truth in characterization, declares that she is "as freshly
modern as any girl of yesterday or to-morrow. 'Clarissa
Harlowe,' in spite of her eighteenth century costume and
keeping, remains a masterpiece in the portraiture of that
ever-womanly which is of all times and places."

Lovelace, too, whose name has become a synonym for the fine
gentleman betrayer, is drawn in a way to make him sympathetic
and creditable; he is far from being a stock figure of villainy.
And the minor figures are often enjoyable; the friendship of
Clarissa with Miss Howe, a young woman of excellent good sense
and seemingly quite devoid of the ultra-sentiment of her time,
preludes that between Diana and her "Tony" in Meredith's great
novel. As a general picture of the society of the period, the
book is full of illuminations and sidelights; of course, the
whole action is set on a stage that bespeaks Richardson's
narrow, middle class morality, his worship of rank, his belief
that worldly goods are the reward of well-doing.

As for the contemporaneous public, it wept and praised and went
with fevered blood because of this fiction. We have heard how
women of sentiment in London town welcomed the book and the
opportunity it offered for unrestrained tears. But it was the
same abroad; as Ike Marvel has it, Rousseau and Diderot over in
France, philosophers as they professed to be, "blubbered their
admiring thanks for 'Clarissa Harlowe."' Similarly, at a later
day we find caustic critics like Jeffrey and Macaulay writing to
Dickens to tell how they had cried over the death of Little
Nell--a scene the critical to-day are likely to stigmatize as
one of the few examples of pathos overdone to be found in the
works of that master. It is scarcely too much to say that the
outcome of no novel in the English tongue was watched with such
bated breath as was that of "Clarissa Harlowe" while the eight
successive books were being issued.

Richardson chose to bask for another half dozen years in the
fame of his second novel, before turning in 1754 to his final
attempt, "Sir Char