"My dear father and mother; I have shown your letter to my beloved.... 'Dear good soul,' said he, 'how does everything they say and everything they write manifest the worthiness of their hearts! Tell them ... let them find out another couple as worthy as themselves, and I will do as much for them. Indeed I would not place them,' continued the dear obliger, 'in the same county, because I would wish two counties to be blessed for their sakes.'... I could only fly to his generous bosom ... and with my eyes swimming in tears of grateful joy ... bless God and bless him with my whole heart; for speak I could not! but almost choked with joy, sobbed to him my grateful acknowledgements.... ''Tis too much, too much,' said I, in broken accents. 'O, sir, bless me more gradually and more cautiously--for I cannot bear it!' And, indeed, my heart went flutter, flutter, flutter, at his dear breast, as if it wanted to break its too narrow prison to mingle still more intimately with his own." And a few lines further on we have this purely commercial view of religion: "And if our prayers shall be heard," continues Pamela, "and we shall have the pleasure to think that his" (her husband's) "advances in piety are owing not a little to them ... then indeed may we take the pride to think we have repaid his goodness to us and that we have satisfied the debt which nothing less can discharge." Or, again, in the same letter, she exclaims anew: "See, O see, my excellent parents, how we are crowned with blessings upon blessings, until we are the talk of all who know us; you for your honesty, I for my humility and virtue;" so that now I have "nothing to do but to reap all the rewards which this life can afford; and if I walk humbly and improve my blessed opportunities, will heighten and perfect all, in a still more joyful futurity." Perhaps a more downright creed, not only of worldliness, but of "other-worldliness," was never more explicitly avowed. Now, to put the whole moral effect of this book into a nutshell--Richardson had gravely announced it as a warning to young servant-girls, but why might he not as well have announced it as an encouragement to old villains? The virtue of Pamela, it is true, is duly rewarded: but Mr. B., with all his villainy, certainly fares better than Pamela: for he not only receives to himself a paragon of a wife, but the sole operation of his previous villainy towards her is to make his neighbors extol him to the skies as a saint, when he turns from it; so that, considering the enormous surplus of Mr. B.'s rewards as against Pamela's, instead of the title _Pamela; or, The Reward of Virtue_, ought not the book to have been called _Mr. B.; or, The Reward of Villainy_?