PREFACE.

FEW novels have ever been so widely and highly praised as "The History of Clarissa Harlowe." At the time of its first appearance, more than a century ago, it was read and wept over, and talked about by every one in England who could read at all; much more literally than even of Dickens' novels, it can be said that it reached the entire reading class. Nor was this merely a popular success. Sherlock commended it (and “Pamela") from the pulpit; Pope praised it in terms unusual with him; Doctor Johnson declared it to be the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart; Sir James Mackintosh thought it the finest work of fiction ever written in any language: Sir Walter Scott said that "no work had appeared before, perhaps none has appeared since, containing such direct appeals to the passions in a manner so irresistible;" and Lord Macaulay is reported to have known it almost by heart. In France, too, the fame of Richardson reached an eminence scarcely ever attained there by a foreign author. Diderot and Rousseau compared him with Homer; and it is said that for many years Frenchmen visiting England were wont to seek the Flask Walk at Hampsteadthe scene of one of the episodes in " Clarissa "—in the belief that the novel recorded historic fact. More than this, the two principal characters of the story have passed into Siterature, and conversation as types; and thousands use Lovelace and Ciarissa as standards of comparison, without any idea of how they get their

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Why is it then, that, outside a small circle of scholars and critics, we so seldom meet with any one nowadays, who has read