Yet Lady Bradshaigh seems to have been a sensible woman, and shows vivacity and intelligence in some of her discussions with Richardson. If he was not altogether spoilt by the flattery of so many excellent women, we can only explain it by remembering that he did not become famous till he was past fifty, and therefore past spoiling. One peculiarity, indeed, is rather unpleasant in these letters. Richardson's worshippers evidently felt that their deity was jealous, and made no scruple of offering the base sacrifice of abuse of rival celebrities. Richardson adopts their tone; he is always gibing at Fielding. '_I could not help telling his sister_', he observes--a sister, too, whose merits Fielding had praised with his usual generosity--'that I was equally surprised at and concerned for his continuous lowness. Had your brother, said I, been born in a stable or been a runner at a sponging-house we should have thought him a genius,' but now! So another great writer came just in time to be judged by Richardson. A bishop asked him, 'Who is this Yorick,' who has, it seems, been countenanced by an 'ingenious dutchess.' Richardson briefly replies that the bishop cannot have looked into the books, 'execrable I cannot but call them.' Their only merit is that they are 'too gross to be inflaming.' The history of the mutual judgments upon each other of contemporary authors would be more amusing than edifying. Richardson should not have been so hard upon Sterne, for Sterne was in some degree following Richardson's lead. 'What is the meaning,' asks Lady Bradshaigh (about 1749) 'of the word _sentimental_, so much in vogue among the polite both in town and country? Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word; but I am convinced a wrong interpretation is given, because it is impossible everything clever and agreeable can be so common as that word.' She has heard of a sentimental man; a sentimental party, and a sentimental walk; and has been applauded for calling a letter sentimental. I hope that the philological dictionary may tell us what was the first appearance of a word which, in this sense, marks an epoch in literature, and, indeed, in much else. I find the word used in the old sense in 1752 in a pamphlet upon '_Sentimental_ differences in point of faith,' that is, differences of sentiment or opinion. When, a few years later, Sterne published his 'Sentimental Journey,' Wesley asks in his journal what is the meaning of the new phrase, and observes (the illustration has lost its point) that you might as well say _continental_. The appearance of the phrase coincides with the appearance of the thing; for Richardson was the first sentimentalist. We may trace the same movement elsewhere, though we need not here speculate upon the cause. Pope's 'Essay on Man' is the expression in verse of the dominant theology of the Deists and their opponents, which was beginning to be condemned as dry and frigid. A