Our space not being boundless we must now skip to Richardson. For Richardson I have the profoundest respect that amounts as nearly as possible to an affection--if that is to say it is possible to have an affection for a man whose death preceded one’s birth by one hundred and twelve years. I do not apologize for the fact that _Pamela_ is my personal favourite, whereas the graver critics and mankind in general prefer _Clarissa_. By that the reader need not be guided, but he should certainly pay a good deal of attention to the works of Richardson--and indeed to Richardson himself. That tranquil person came into the world in 1689--twenty-seven or eight years after the birth of Defoe and one year after the death of Bunyan. But whereas both of his predecessors seem to strike notes almost entirely of the seventeenth century, Richardson seems to be absolutely of the eighteenth and, with him, sentimentality was born in the world of the novel. That perhaps was necessary to an age that banished if not conventional, then at least doctrinal, moralizings to its collections of sermons in volume form. For them of course there was a prodigious demand. Of course, too, it would be wrong to assert that moralizing found no place in the novels of Richardson since the high moral purpose breathes from every pore of his pages. But it was not with moralizing that he made his primary appeal as had been the case with Bunyan, nor was it likely that had he so done he would have found many readers. No, it is his sentimentalizing that is his E string. Against that I have nothing to say. Anglo-Saxons are sentimentalists before everything and in all their arts, and it is probable that without sentimentality as an ingredient no Anglo-Saxon artist could work: certainly he could have no appeal. To produce national masterpieces in paint Turner must bathe his canvases deep in that gentle fluid; the English lyric is a marvel of sentimentality and so is English domestic architecture with its mellow--or mellowed!--red brick, its dove-cotes, its south walls for netted fruits. So the first of modern novelists must be one of the greatest of sentimentalists. And on those lines his appeal is universal and everlasting. Only to-day an American left the ship on which I am writing in the port of Lisbon and, I happening to mention because he was in my mind the name of Richardson, this American--professor at that and practitioner of a sister art--this American gentleman assured me solemnly that he read _Clarissa Harlowe_ at least twice every year and cried often during each reading. Now there must be some reason for this phenomenon, which appears very singular. It is not, however, rare, for the hottest literary discussions I have ever had in England--where, of course, the discussion of literature is not in good form--have been with laymen like professors or lawyers as to the relative merits of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_.