29 
was after him—from correspondents begging him to save the inno- 
cent Clarissa, or to reform the rake Lovelace, as if they were living 
souls whose fate in another world depended upon their behaviour 
in this. ‘Pray sir,” wrote one lady, “‘make Lovelace happy: you 
can so easily do it: pray reform him; will you not save a soul, 
sir?” 
Byron could not read “Clarissa Harlowe” through ; Rousseau, 
on the other hand, and Diderot declared that ‘‘no romance had 
ever been written in any language equal to, or even approaching 
it.” The hyper-aristocratic Horace Walpole pronounced it and 
“Sir Charles Grandison” to be “two deplorably tedious lamen- 
tations,—pictures of high life as it would be conceived by a 
bookseller, and romances as they would be spiritualized by a 
Methodist teacher.” ‘Thackeray once told Macaulay that he had 
‘not read “Clarissa.” “Not read ‘Clarissa !’” cried Macaulay. “If 
you have once thoroughly entered on ‘Clarissa,’ and are infected 
by it, you can’t leave it. When I was in India, I passed one 
season at the hills, and there were the Governor-General and the 
Secretary of Government, and the Commander-in-Chief, and their 
wives. I had ‘Clarissa’ with me, and as soon as they began to 
read, the whole station was in a passion of excitement about Miss 
Harlowe and her, misfortunes and her scoundrelly Lovelace. The 
Governor’s wife seized the book, and the Secretary waited for it, 
and the Chief Justice could not read it for tears.” That was more 
than fifty years ago, before the day of Dickens and Thackeray, of 
Miss Bronté and George Eliot, and of hundreds of others who 
have had their day and ceased to be, or who still live as esteemed 
tenants of our shelves, and I venture to doubt whether ‘Clarissa 
Hariowe” would make quite such a sensation now at a hill station 
in India. Whose fault is that? Or is it anybody’s fault? Is it 
not because the best novel is from its nature more ephemeral than 
the best poetry or the best history? It smacks more of the 
generation for which it was written: it is more for an age, and 
less for all time. The extreme length of “Clarissa,” its antiquated 
and formal style, and its minuteness of detail and lack of incident, 
are sufficient to account for its being distasteful to the present age, 
