and this reputation led certain publishers to approach him with a proposal that he write a series of Familiar Letters, which could be used as models by people unused to writing.  Richardson gladly accepted the proposal, and had the happy inspiration to make these letters tell the connected story of a girl’s life.  Defoe had told an adventure story of human life on a desert island, but Richardson would tell the story of a girl’s inner life in the midst of English neighbors.  That sounds simple enough now, but it marked an epoch in the history of literature.  Like every other great and simple discovery, it makes us wonder why some one had not thought of it before.

RICHARDSON’S NOVELS.  The result of Richardson’s inspiration was Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, an endless series of letters[216] telling of the trials, tribulations, and the final happy marriage of a too sweet young maiden, published in four volumes extending over the years 1740 and 1741.  Its chief fame lies in the fact that it is our first novel in the modern sense.  Aside from this important fact, and viewed solely as a novel, it is sentimental, grandiloquent, and wearisome.  Its success at the time was enormous, and Richardson began another series of letters (he could tell a story in no other way) which occupied his leisure hours for the next six years.  The result was Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, published in eight volumes in 1747-1748.  This was another, and somewhat better, sentimental novel; and it was received with immense enthusiasm.  Of all Richardson’s heroines Clarissa is the most human.  In her doubts and scruples of conscience, and especially in her bitter grief and humiliation, she is a real woman, in marked contrast with the mechanical hero, Lovelace, who simply illustrates the author’s inability to portray a man’s character.  The dramatic element in this novel is strong, and is increased by means of the letters, which enable the reader to keep close to the characters of the story and to see life from their different view points.  Macaulay, who was deeply impressed by Clarissa, is said to have made the remark that, were the novel lost, he could restore almost the whole of it from memory.

Richardson now turned from his middle-class heroines, and in five or six years completed another series of letters, in which he attempted to tell the story of a man and an aristocrat.  The result was Sir Charles Grandison (1754), a novel in seven volumes, whose hero was intended to be a model of aristocratic manners and virtues for the middle-class people, who largely constituted the novelist’s readers.  For Richardson, who began in Pamela with the purpose of teaching his hearers how to write, ended with the deliberate purpose of teaching them how to live; and in most of his work his chief object was, in his own words, to inculcate virtue and good deportment.  His novels, therefore, suffer as much from his purpose