28 
The first two English novels appeared almost simultaneously 
just one hundred and fifty years ago. Richardson’s “Pamela” 
was published in 1739-41, and Fielding’s ‘‘Joseph Andrews” in 
1742. Richardson is generally spoken of as our earliest novelist, 
but he and Fielding enter the arena so nearly together, and the 
one is so little an imitator of the other, and the two together so 
cover the whole ground of the ‘‘novel,” as we understand the 
word, that I think the honour of the discovery—(or perhaps I 
ought to say, of the zmfortation, for they both came after Le 
Sage and Marivaux) should be divided between them. 
Of Richardson’s three novels—“ Pamela,” ‘Clarissa Harlowe,” 
and “Sir Charles Grandison”—“ Pamela” was the first, and 
“Clarissa Harlowe” the longest and best; and the best in spite of 
being very long. “Pamela,” says Sir Walter Scott in his life of 
Richardson, ‘‘made a most powerful impression on the public. 
Hitherto romances had been written generally in the old French 
taste, containing the protracted amours of princes and princesses 
told in language wildly extravagant and metaphysically absurd. ° 
In these wearisome performances there appeared not the most 
distant allusion to the ordinary tone of feeling, the slightest 
attempt to paint mankind as it exists in the ordinary walks of life. 
It will be Richardson’s eternal praise, did he merit no more, that 
he tore from his personages those painted vizards which concealed 
under a clumsy and affected disguise everything like the natural 
lineaments of the human countenance, and placed them before us 
barefaced in all the actual change of feature and expression and 
all the light and shade of human passion. It requires a reader to 
be in some degree acquainted with the huge folios of inanity over 
which our ancestors yawned themselves to sleep, e’er he can 
estimate the delight they must have experienced from this unex- 
pected return to truth and nature.” 
“Clarissa Harlowe” excited probably greater enthusiasm and 
greater curiosity than any work that ever was published, except, 
perhaps, the early “Waverley Novels.” Richardson, who was a 
master printer, and fifty years old when he began to write, published 
Clarissa” in instalments, and was deluged with letters—as Dickens 
