vilest and silliest part of the nation, being (generally) very
low-born themselves"--a quotation deliciously commingled of
prejudice and worldly wisdom.

But Richardson, who began his career by writing amatory epistles
for serving maids, realized (and showed his genius thereby),
that if the hard fortunes and eventful triumph of the humble
Pamela could but be sympathetically portrayed, the interest on
the part of his aristocratic audience was certain to follow,--as
the sequel proved.

He knew that because Pamela was a human being she might
therefore be made interesting; he adopted, albeit unconsciously,
the Terentian motto that nothing human should be alien from the
interests of his readers. And as the Novel developed, this
interest not only increased in intensity, but ever spread until
it depicted with truth and sympathy all sorts and conditions of
men. The typical novelist to-day prefers to leave the beaten
highway and go into the by-ways for his characters; his interest
is with the humble of the earth, the outcast and alien, the
under dog in the social struggle. It has become well-nigh a
fashion, a fad, to deal with these picturesque and once
unexploited elements of the human passion-play.

This interest does not stop even at man; influenced by modern
conceptions of life, it overleaps the line of old supposed to be
impassable, and now includes the lower order of living things:
animals have come into their own and a Kipling or a London gives
us the psychology of brutekind as it has never been drawn
before--from the view-point of the animal himself. Our little