opportunity it offered for unrestrained tears. But it was the
same abroad; as Ike Marvel has it, Rousseau and Diderot over in
France, philosophers as they professed to be, "blubbered their
admiring thanks for 'Clarissa Harlowe."' Similarly, at a later
day we find caustic critics like Jeffrey and Macaulay writing to
Dickens to tell how they had cried over the death of Little
Nell--a scene the critical to-day are likely to stigmatize as
one of the few examples of pathos overdone to be found in the
works of that master. It is scarcely too much to say that the
outcome of no novel in the English tongue was watched with such
bated breath as was that of "Clarissa Harlowe" while the eight
successive books were being issued.

Richardson chose to bask for another half dozen years in the
fame of his second novel, before turning in 1754 to his final
attempt, "Sir Charles Grandison," wherein it was his purpose to
depict the perfect pattern of a gentleman, "armed at all points"
of social and moral behavior. We must bear in mind that when
"Clarissa" was published he was sixty years of age and to be
pardoned if he did not emulate so many novel-makers of these
brisker mercantile times and turn off a story or so a year.

By common confession, this is the poorest of his three fictions.
In the first place, we are asked to move more steadily in the
aristocratic atmosphere where the novelist did not breathe to
best advantage. Again, Richardson was an adept in drawing women
rather than men and hence was self-doomed in electing a
masculine protagonist. He is also off his proper ground in
laying part of the action in Italy.