uncles and aunts--and, wooed by Lovelace, a dashing rake who is
in love with her according to his lights, but by no means
intends honorable matrimony, she flies with him in a chariot and
four, to find herself in a most anomalous position, and so dies
broken-hearted; to be followed in her fate by Lovelace, who is
represented as a man whose loose principles are in conflict with
a nature which is far from being utterly bad. The narrative is
mainly developed through letters exchanged between Clarissa and
her friend, Miss Howe. There can hardly be a more striking
testimony to the leisure enjoyed by the eighteenth-century than
that society was not bored by a story the length of which seems
almost interminable to the reader to-day. The slow movement is
sufficient to preclude its present prosperity. It is safe to say
that Richardson is but little read now; read much less than his
great contemporary, Fielding. And apparently it is his bulk
rather than his want of human interest or his antiquated manner
that explains the fact. The instinct to-day is against fiction
that is slow and tortuous in its onward course; at least so it
seemed until Mr. De Morgan returned in his delightful volumes to
the method of the past. Those are pertinent words of the
distinguished Spanish novelist, Valdes: "An author who wishes to
be read not only in his life, but after his death (and the
author who does not wish this should lay aside his pen), cannot
shut his eyes, when unblinded by vanity, to the fact that not
only is it necessary to be interesting to save himself from
oblivion, but the story must not be a very long one. The world
contains so many great and beautiful works that it requires a
long life to read them all. To ask the public, always anxious
for novelty, to read a production of inordinate length, when so
many others are demanding attention, seems to me useless and