In these no attempt is made to depict human nature naturally, or to endue the characters represented with the ordinary language, idiosyncrasies, temper, or feelings of living beings. Richardson’s style was formal and spiritless, and the epistolary form in which he developed his long-drawn stories absolutely wearisome; but he painted men and women, and made them speak. Their joys and sorrows, trials and temptations, were true to Nature, as were their weaknesses and vices; and this living force in his delineations—the human passion and the human pathos, that make many of his descriptions throb with life—touched the hearts of his readers, unaccustomed to such graphic treatment, with spontaneous sympathy, and set all England weeping over the imaginary wrongs and sorrows of _Miss Clarisse_, which Mr. Lang tells us the Young Pretender, with a reward of £30,000 for his apprehension hanging over his head, requested a lady of his acquaintance to secure for him. Not only matrons and maidens, but men also, persisted through the seven or eight volumes with unflagging interest, and any amount of lachrymatory effusion, amongst them a Bishop, who cheerfully averred that he had ‘shed buckets full of tears over its pages.’[266] No wonder if the author (whom Horace Walpole and others regarded as a ‘conceited prig’) did feel a little lifted up in self-estimation, especially when Johnson sententiously observed to him that in writing his story of ‘Clarissa Harlowe’ he ‘had enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue.’ There is no doubt that Richardson’s writings initiated the English novel, which henceforth became the favourite form with writers of fiction. It will be remembered by those who have read ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ a reprint of which, edited by Dallas, was brought out some years ago, that the heroine, in her innocence, takes shelter at the Upper Flask Tavern, and subsequently finds lodgings in Flask Road. Mrs. Barbauld tells us of her own knowledge of a Frenchman who paid a visit to Hampstead for the ‘sole purpose of finding the house in Flask Walk where Clarissa had lodged, and was surprised at the ignorance or indifference of the inhabitants on the subject,’ just as if Clarissa had been a living being.