nearest thing to her in English prose fiction before (Marianne, of course, is closer in French) is Moll Flanders: and good as Moll is, she is flat and lifeless in comparison with Pamela. You may call "my master's" mistress (actually in the honourable sense, but never in the dishonourable) again a minx, though a better minx than Blanche, if you like. But there is no animal more alive than a minx: and you will certainly not find a specimen of the species in any English novel before. As for description and dialogue, there is not very much of the former in _Pamela_, though it might not be unfair to include under the head those details, after the manner of Defoe (such as Pamela's list of purchases when she thinks she is going home), which supply their own measure of verisimilitude to the story. But there are some things of the kind which Defoe never would have thought of--such as the touches of the "tufts of grass" and the "pretty sort of wildflower that grows yonder near the elm, the fifth from us on the left," which occur in the gipsy scene. The dialogue plays a much more important part: and may be brought into parallel with that in the _Polite Conversation_, referred to above and published just before _Pamela_. It is "reported" of course, instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with the letter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very little difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all. Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt on, makes an astonishing progress--the blood and colour of the novel, which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied, if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yet only the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirable touch in which, when the "reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries" are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time) suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and giving them an inn to keep--Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly feminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, "This would not look like very heavy punishment to poor John?" She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course, but only "as a Christian"--as a greater than Richardson put it afterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whom Richardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.