Against all these expostulations Richardson hardened himself. He knew that to bestow Clarissa upon the repentant Lovelace would have been to undermine the fabric he had built. This was the very purpose which the criminal had proposed to himself in the atrocious crime he had committed, and it was to dismiss him from the scene rewarded, not punished. The sublimity of the moral would have been altogether destroyed, since vice would have been no longer rendered hateful and miserable through its very success, nor virtue honoured and triumphant even by its degradation. The death of Clarissa alone could draw down on the guilty head of her betrayer the just and necessary retribution, and his guilt was of far too deep a dye to be otherwise expiated. Besides, the author felt, and forcibly pointed out, the degradation which the fervent creation of his fancy must have sustained, could she, with all her wrongs forgotten, and with the duty imposed on her by matrimony, to love, honour, and obey her betrayer, have sat down the common-place good wife of her reformed rake. Indeed, those who peruse the work with attention, will perceive that the author has been careful, in the earlier stages of his narrative, to bar out every prospect of such a union. Notwithstanding the levities and constitutional good-humour of Lovelace, his mind is too much perverted, his imagination too much inflamed, by his own perverted Quixotism, and, above all, his heart is too much hardened, to render it possible for any one seriously to think of his conversion as sincere, or his union with Clarissa as happy. He had committed a crime for which he deserved death by the law of the country; and notwithstanding those good qualities with which the author has invested him, that he may not seem an actual incarnate fiend, there is no reader but feels vindictive pleasure when Morden passes the sword through his body.

On the other hand, Clarissa, reconciled to her violator, must have lost, in the eye of the reader, that dignity, with which the refusal of his hand, the only poor reparation he could offer, at present invests her; and it was right and fitting that a creature, every way so excellent, should, as is fabled of the ermine, pine to death on account of the stain with which she had been so injuriously sullied. We cannot, con

sistently with the high idea which we have previously entertained of her purity of character, imagine her surviving the contamination. On the whole, as Richardson himself pleaded, Clarissa has, as the narrative presently stands, the greatest of triumphs even in this world— the greatest, even in and after the outrage, and because of the outrage, that any woman ever had.

It has often been observed, that the extreme severity of the parents and relatives in this celebrated novel does not belong to our day, or perhaps even to Richardson's; and that Clarissa's dutiful scruples at assuming her own estate, or extricating herself by Miss Howe's means, are driven to extremity. Something, no doubt, must be allowed for the licence of an author, who must necessarily, in order to command interest and attention, extend his incidents to the extreme verge of probability; but, besides, it is well known, that at least within the century, the notions of the patria potestas were of a much severer nature than those now entertained; that forced marriages have actually taken place, and that in houses of considerable rank; that the voice of public opinion had then comparatively little effect upon great and opulent families, inhabiting their country-seats, and living amid their own dependants, where strange violences were sometimes committed, under the specious pretext of enforcing domestic discipline. Each family was a little tribe within itself; and the near relations, like the elders among the Jews, had their Sanhedrim, where resolutions were adopted, as laws to controul the free will of each individual member. It is upon this family compact that the Harlowes ground the rights which they assert with so much tyranny; and before the changes which have slackened the bonds of relationship, we believe that such incidents were not infrequent. But whether we consider Richardson as exhibiting a state of manners which may have lingered in the remote parts of England down to his own time, or suppose that he coloured them according to his own invention, and particularly according to his high notions of the "awful rule and right supremacy," lodged in the head of a family, there can be no doubt of the spirit with which the picture is executed; and particularly of the

various gradations in which the Harlowe spirit exhibits itself, in the insolent and conceited brother, the mean and envious sister, the stern and unrelenting father, softened down in the elder brother James, and again roughened and exaggerated in the old seaman Anthony, each of whom, in various modifications, exhibits the same family features of avarice, pride, and ambition..

Miss Howe is an admirably sketched character, drawn in strong contrast to that of Clarissa, yet worthy of being her friend—with more of worldly perspicacity, though less of abstracted principle; and who, when they argue upon points of doubt and delicacy, is often able, by going directly to the question at issue, to start the game, while her more gifted correspondent does but beat the bush. Her high spirit and disinterested devotion for her friend, acknowledging, as she does on all occasions, her own inferiority, shew her in a noble point of view; and though we are afraid she must have given honest Hickman (notwithstanding her resolutions to the contrary,) rather an uneasy time of it after mariage, yet it is impossible not to think that she was a prize worth suffering for.

The publication of Clarissa raised the fame of the author to the height. No work had appeared before, perhaps none has appeared since, containing so many direct appeals to the passions, stated too in a manner so irresistible. And high as his reputation stood in his own country, it was even more exalted in those of France and Germany, whose imaginations are more easily excited, and their passions more easily moved by tales of fictitious distress, than are the coldblooded English. Foreigners of distinction have been known to visit Hampstead, and to inquire for the Flask-walk, distinguished as a scene in Clarissa's history, just as travellers visit the rocks of Meillerie to view the localities of Rousseau's tale of passion.

There was never, perhaps, an author who was not encouraged by popular applause again to venture himself before the public; and Richardson, secure, moreover, in the prepossession of a large party of friends and admirers, was of course no exception to the general rule.

The subject of the third and last novel of this eminent author seems to have been in a great degree dictated by the criticism which Clarissa had undergone. To his own surprise, as he assured his correspondents, he found that the gaiety, bravery, and occasionally, generosity of Lovelace, joined to his courage and ingenuity, had, in spite of his crimes, made him find too much grace in the eyes of his fair readers. He had been so studious to prevent this, that when he perceived his rake was rising into an undue and dangerous degree of favour with some of the young ladies of his own school, he threw in some darker shades of character. In this, according to the eulogy of Johnson, he was eminently successful; but still Lovelace appeared too captivating in the eyes of his fair friends, and even of Lady Bradshaigh; so that nothing remained for the author, in point of morality, but to prepare with all speed an antidote to the poison which he had incautiously administered.

With this view, the author tasked his talents to embody the beau ideal of a virtuous character, who should have all the title to admiration which he could receive from wit, rank, figure, accomplishment, and fashion, yet compounded inseparably with the still higher qualifications which form the virtuous citizen and the faithful votary of religion. It was with this view that Richardson produced the work, originally denominated The Good Man, a title which, before publication, he judiciously exchanged for that of Sir Charles Grandison.

It must be acknowledged, that although the author exerted his utmost ability to succeed in the task which he had assumed, and, so fąr as detached parts of the work are considered, has given the same marks of genius which he employed in his former novels, yet this last production has neither the simplicity of the two first volumes of Pamela, nor the deep and overwhelming interest of the inimitable Clarissa, and must, considering it as a whole, be ranked considerably beneath both these works.

The principal cause of failure may be perhaps traced to Richardson's too strong recollection of the aversion which his friendly critics and correspondents had displayed, to the melancholy scenes in Cla

rissa, in which, darkening and deepening as the story proceeds, his heroine is involved, until the scene is closed by death. He was resolved (perhaps) to give his readers some indemnification, and having formerly shewn them virtue in its state of earthly persecution and calamity, now resolved to introduce her, as John Bunyan says, in her golden slippers, and walking abroad in the sunshine. But the author did not sufficiently reflect, that the beacon, upon an exposed headland, sending forth its saving light amid the rain and the storm, and burning where all around combines to its extinction, is a far grander and more interesting object to the imagination than the chandelier in a lordly hall, secured by walls and casements from the possibility even of a transient breeze agitating its brilliancy of lustre.

Sir Charles Grandison is a man of large fortune, of rank and of family, high in the opinion of all who know him, and discharging with the most punctilious accuracy his duties in every relation of life. But in order to his doing so, he is accommodated with all those exterior advantages which command awe and attract respect, although entirely adventitious to excellence of principle. He is munificent, but his fortune bears out his generosity; he is affectionate in his domestic relations, but the devoted attachment of his family leaves him no emptation to be otherwise; his temperament is averse from excess; his passions are under the command of his reason; his courage has been so often proved, that he can safely, and without reproach of the world, prefer the dictates of Christianity to the rules of modern honour; and in adventuring himself into danger, he has all the strength and address of Lovelace himself to trust to. Sir Charles encounters no misfortunes, and can hardly be said to undergo any trials. The author, in a word, has sent him forth

-Victorious,

Happy, and glorious.

The only dilemma to which he is exposed in the course of the seven volumes, is the doubt which of two beautiful and accomplished women, excellent in disposition and high in rank, sister excellencies as it were,