The little sentence quoted some pages back from Walpole's letters is sufficient proof, if proof were needed, of its immediate success. Andrew Millar was shrewd enough, despite his constitutional confusion, and he is not likely to have given an additional L100 to the author of any book without good reason. But the indications of that success are not very plainly impressed upon the public prints. The _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1749, which, as might be expected from Johnson's connection with it, contains ample accounts of his own tragedy of _Irene_ and Richardson's recently-published _Clarissa_, has no notice of _Tom Jones_, nor is there even any advertisement of the second edition issued in the same year. But, in the emblematic frontispiece, it appears under _Clarissa_ (and sharing with that work a possibly unintended proximity to a sprig of laurel stuck in a bottle of Nantes), among a pile of the books of the year; and in the "poetical essays" for August, one Thomas Cawthorn breaks into rhymed panegyric. "Sick of her fools," sings this enthusiastic but scarcely lucid admirer-- "Sick of her fools, great _Nature_ broke the jest, And _Truth_ held out each character to test, When _Genius_ spoke: Let _Fielding_ take the pen! Life dropt her mask, and all mankind were men." There were others, however, who would scarcely have echoed the laudatory sentiments of Mr. Cawthorn. Among these was again the excellent Richardson, who seems to have been wholly unpropitiated by the olive branch held out to him in the _Jacobite's Journal_. His vexation at the indignity put upon _Pamela_ by _Joseph Andrews_ was now complicated by a twittering jealousy of the "spurious brat," as he obligingly called _Tom Jones_, whose success had been so "unaccountable." In these circumstances, some of the letters of his correspondents must have been gall and wormwood to him. Lady Bradshaigh, for instance, under her _nom de guerre_ of "Belfour," tells him that she is fatigued with the very name of the book, having met several young ladies who were for ever talking of their Tom Jones's, "for so they call their favourites," and that the gentlemen, on their side, had their Sophias, one having gone so far as to give that all-popular name to his "Dutch mastiff puppy." But perhaps the best and freshest exhibition (for, as far as can be ascertained, it has never hitherto been made public) of Richardson's attitude to his rival is to be found in a little group of letters in the Forster collection at South Kensington. The writers are Aaron Hill and his daughters; but the letters do not seem to have been known to Mrs. Barbauld, whose last communication from Hill is dated November 2, 1748. Nor are they to be found in Hill's own Correspondence. The ladies, it appears, had visited Richardson at Salisbury Court in 1741, and were great admirers of _Pamela_, and the "divine _Clarissa_." Some months after _Tom Jones_ was published, Richardson (not yet having brought