Grandison.

Nor is this the only charge that can be made and sustained against our
poet. It is also to be noted in his disparagement that he is the author
of _Sir Charles Grandison_, and that _Sir Charles Grandison_, epic of the
polite virtues, is deadly dull. 'My dear,' says somebody in one of Mr.
Thackeray's books, 'your eternal blue velvet quite tires me.' That is
the worst of _Sir Charles Grandison_: his eternal blue velvet--his
virtue, that is, his honour, his propriety, his good fortune, his absurd
command over the affections of the other sex, his swordsmanship, his
manliness, his patriotic sentiment, his noble piety--quite tires you. He
is an ideal, but so very, very tame that it is hard to justify his
existence. He is too perfect to be of the slightest moral use to
anybody. He has everything he wants, so that he has no temptation to be
wicked; he is incapable of immorality, so that he is easily quit of all
inducements to be vicious; he has no passions, so that he is superior to
every sort of spiritual contest; he is monstrous clever, so that he has
made up his mind about everything knowable and unknowable; he is
excessively virtuous so that he has made it up in the right direction. He
is, as Mr. Leslie Stephen remarks, a tedious commentary on the truth of
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's acute reflection upon the moral effect of five
thousand a year. He is only a pattern creature, because he has neither
need nor opportunity, neither longing nor capacity, to be anything else.
In real life such faultless monsters are impossible: one does not like to
think what would happen if they were not. In fiction they are possible
enough, and--what is more to the purpose--they are of necessity
extravagantly dull. This is what is the matter with Sir Charles. He is
dull, and he effuses dulness. By dint of being uninteresting himself he
makes his surroundings uninteresting. In the record of his adventures
and experiences there is enough of wit and character and invention to
make the fortune of a score or more of such novels as the public of these
degenerate days would hail with enthusiasm. But his function is to
vitiate them all. He is a bore of the first magnitude, and of his
eminence in that capacity his history is at once the monument and the
proof.

Clarissa.

But if _Grandison_ be dull and _Pamela_ contemptible _Clarissa_ remains;
and _Clarissa_ is what Musset called it, 'le premier roman du monde.' Of
cou