well advanced,
his fortune was assured, and he was surrounded by a group of
affectionate relatives and admiring female friends, when he was asked
by a publisher to write "a little book of familiar letters on the
useful concerns in common life." While thinking over this proposal, be
recollected a story once told him of a young servant-girl, whose honor
was long attempted by a dissolute master, and who, by her resolute
chastity, finally conquered his vicious intentions, and was rewarded
by honorable marriage with her thwarted seducer. And then it occurred
to Richardson, that this story, "if written in an easy and natural
manner, suitable to the simplicity of it, might possibly introduce a
new species of writing, that might possibly turn young people into a
course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance
writing, and, dismissing the improbable and marvellous, with which
novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion
and virtue." Such was the origin of a novel destined to make a new era
in English fiction. It is evident that Richardson placed before himself
two aims: to promote the cause of religion and virtue, and to introduce
a new species of writing, and in both he succeeded.

The name, "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded," sounds like a tract, and
"Pamela" is, indeed, a very long tract. The contrast is curious between
the moral object of the work and its contents. In the preface we are
told that "Pamela" is to inculcate religion and morality in an easy and
agreeable manner; it is to make vice odious, to make virtue truly
lovely, and to give practical examples, "worthy to be followed, in the
most critical cases, by the modest virgin, the chaste bride, and the
obliging wife." Moreover, all this is to be done, "without raising a
single idea throughout the whole, that shall shock the exactest
purity." Yet, "Pamela" contains not a few scenes likely to inflame the
imagination, and its subject, kept continually before the reader's
mind, is the licentious pursuit of a young girl. This story would not
now do for a tract. But it answered the purpose very well in the
eighteenth century. Richardson had no fear his book would give the
youthful reader any new knowledge of evil, or that the long account of
Pamela's attempted seduction would shock the "exactest purity" of his
time. He simply described the dangers to which every attractive young
woman was more or less subject by the prevailing looseness of