The original admirers of _Pamela_, then, were certainly justified: and even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be transposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider this first complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and ask ourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to its predecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what its positive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive merits or defects which it shows in its author. The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course, the letter-form. More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps, than about some other points in the inquiry. The initial difficulty of fiction which does not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage is the question, "What does all this mean?" "What is the authority?" "How does the author know it all?" And a hundred critics have pointed out that there are practically only three ways of meeting this. The boldest and the best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist themselves; to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, ignore it, and pass on, secure of safety, to tell your story "from the blue," as if it were an actual history or revelation, or something passing before the eyes of the reader. But at that time few novelists had the courage to do this, daunted as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of verse, of the vantage-room of the stage. Then there is the alternative of recounting it by the mouth of one of the actors in, or spectators of, the events--a plan obvious, early, presenting some advantages, still very commonly followed, but always full of little traps and pits of improbability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the character (if he is made to have any) of the narrator himself. Thirdly, there is the again easy resource of the "document" in its various forms. Of these, letters and diaries possess some prerogative advantages; and were likely to suggest themselves very particularly at this time when the actual letter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) had for some generations appeared, and were beginning to be common. In the first place the information thus obtained looks natural and plausible: and there is a subsidiary advantage--on which Richardson does not draw very much in _Pamela_, but which he employs to the full later--that by varying your correspondents you can get different views of the same event, and first-hand manifestations of extremely different characters.