Note 793 — Part II—The Worldlings (continued 7)

In "Novels and Novelists," by W. Forsyth, 1871, it is said, ch. VII: "To me, I confess, 'Clarissa Harlowe' is an unpleasant, not to say odious book.... If any book deserved the charge of sickly sentimentality, it is this; and that it should have once been so widely popular, and thought admirably adapted to instruct young women in lessons of virtue and religion, shows a strange and perverted state of the public taste, not to say public morals." Mrs. Oliphant, in her "Historical Sketches of the Reign of George Second," 1869, says of the same novel (II. X. 264): "Richardson was a respectable tradesman,... a good printer,... a comfortable soul,... never owing a guinea nor transgressing a rule of morality; and yet so much a poet, that he has added at least one character (Clarissa Harlowe) to the inheritance of the world, of which Shakespeare need not have been ashamed—the most celestial thing, the highest effort of his generation."—Tr.