Wearied as the world had been by what Sir Walter Scott calls the "huge folios of inanity" which had preceded him, the work was hailed with delight. There was a little affectation; but the sentiment was moral and natural. Ladies carried _Pamela_ about in their rides and walks. Pope, near his end, said it was a better moral teacher than sermons: Sherlock recommended it from the pulpit. PAMELA, AND OTHER NOVELS.--_Pamela_ is represented as a poor servant-maid, but beautiful and chaste, whose honor resists the attack of her dissolute master, and whose modesty and virtue overcome his evil nature. Subdued and reclaimed by her chastity and her charms, he reforms, and marries her. Some pictures which are rather warmly colored and indelicate in our day were quite in keeping with the taste of that time, and gave greater effect to the moral lesson assigned to be taught. In his next work, _Clarissa Harlowe_, which appeared in 1749, he has drawn the picture of a perfect woman preserving her purity amid seductive gayeties, and suffering sorrows to which those of the Virgin Martyr are light. We have, too, an excellent portraiture of a bold and wicked, but clever and gifted man--Lovelace. His third and last novel, _Sir Charles Grandison_, appeared in 1753. The hero, _Sir Charles_, is the model of a Christian gentleman; but is, perhaps, too faultless for popular appreciation. In his delineations of humbler natures,--country girls like _Pamela_,--Richardson is happiest: in his descriptions of high life he has failed from ignorance. He was not acquainted with the best society, and all his grandees are stilted, artificial, and affected; but even in this fault he is of value, for he shows us how men of his class at that time regarded the society of those above them. These works, which, notwithstanding their length, were devoured eagerly as soon as they appeared, are little read at present, and exist rather as historical interpreters of an age that is past, than as present light literature: they have been driven from our shelves by Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and a host of charming novelists since his day. Richardson lived the admired of a circle of ladies,--to whose sex he had paid so noble a tribute,--the hero of tea-drinkings at his house on Parson's Green; his books gave him fame, but his shop--in the back office of which he wrote his novels, when not pressed by business--gave him money and its comforts. He died at the age of seventy-two, on the 4th of July, 1761.