The story of his adventures would not make a poem like the Odyssey,
it is true; but the relator had the true genius of a poet. It has been
made a question whether Richardson's romances are poetry; and the answer
perhaps is, that they are not poetry, because they are not romance. The
interest is worked up to an inconceivable height; but it is by an
infinite number of little things, by incessant labour and calls upon the
attention, by a repetition of blows that have no rebound in them. The
sympathy excited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is
unforced and spontaneous. There is a want of elasticity and motion. The
story does not "give an echo to the seat where love is throned." The
heart does not answer of itself like a chord in music. The fancy does
not run on before the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged
along with an infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which
the Lilliputians dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace.--Sir
Charles Grandison is a coxcomb. What sort of a figure would he cut,
translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the
divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her
ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles--she is
interesting in all that is uninteresting. Such things, however intensely
they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination.
There is infinite truth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extracted
from a _caput mortuum_ of circumstances: it does not evaporate of
itself. His poetical genius is like Ariel confined in a pine-tree, and
requires an artificial process to let it out. Shakspeare says--

"Our poesy is as a gum
Which issues whence 'tis nourished, our gentle flame
Provokes itself, and like the current flies
Each bound it chafes." [1]