have been willing to draw upon the backstairs history of the
servants' hall for his first heroine.

To be sure, Mr. Richardson had the not uncommon failing of the
humble-born: he desired above all, and attempted too much, to
depict the manners of the great; he had naive aristocratical
leanings which account for his uncertain tread when he would
move with ease among the boudoirs of Mayfair. Nevertheless, in
the honest heart of him, as his earliest novel forever proves,
he felt for the woes of those social underlings who, as we have
long since learned, have their microcosm faithfully reflecting
the greater world they serve, and he did his best work in that
intimate portrayal of the feminine heart, which is not of a
class but typically human; he knew Clarissa Harlowe quite as
well as he did Pamela; both were of interest because they were
women. That acute contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
severely reprimands Richardson for his vulgar lapses in painting
polite society and the high life he so imperfectly knew; yet in
the very breath that she condemns "Clarissa Harlowe" as "most
miserable stuff," confesses that "she was such an old fool as to
weep over" it "like any milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of
the Lady's Fall"--the handsomest kind of a compliment under the
circumstances. And with the same charming inconsistency, she
declares on the appearance of "Sir Charles Grandison" that she
heartily despises Richardson, yet eagerly reads him--"nay, sobs
over his works in the most scandalous manner."

Richardson was the son of a carpenter and himself a respected
printer, who by cannily marrying the daughter of the man to whom
he was apprenticed, and by diligence in his vocation, rose to