It is unfortunate for Mr. Lowe's reputation as a prophet that, after more than one hundred and thirty years, this ephemeral firework, as he deemed it, should still be sparkling with undiminished brilliancy, and to judge by recent editions, is selling as vigorously as ever. From the days when Lady Mary wrote "_Ne plus ultra_" in her own copy, and La Harpe called it _le premier roman du monde_, (a phrase which, by the way, De Musset applies to _Clarissa_), it has come down to us with an almost universal accompaniment of praise. Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,--have all left their admiration on record,-- to say nothing of professional critics innumerable. As may be seen from the British Museum Catalogue, it has been translated into French, German, Polish, Dutch, and Spanish. Russia and Sweden have also their versions. The first French translation, or rather abridgment, by M. de La Place was prohibited in France (to Richardson's delight) by royal decree, an act which affords another instance, in Scott's words, of that "French delicacy, which, on so many occasions, has strained at a gnat, and swallowed a camel" (e.g. the novels of M. Crebillon _fils_). La Place's edition (1750) was gracefully illustrated with sixteen plates by Hubert Bourguignon, called Gravelot, one of those eighteenth-century illustrators whose designs at present are the rage in Paris. In England, Fielding's best-known pictorial interpreters are Rowlandson and Cruikshank, the latter being by far the more sympathetic. Stothard also prepared some designs for Harrison's _Novelists Magazine_; but his refined and effeminate pencil was scarcely strong enough for the task. Hogarth alone could have been the ideal illustrator of Henry Fielding; that is to say--if, in lieu of the rude designs he made for _Tristram Shandy_, he could have been induced to undertake the work in the larger fashion of the _Rake's Progress_, or _The Marriage a la Mode_.