For me, I read Richardson for a hearty and wholesome dose of sentimentality and if one does that one may as well have that quality laid on as thickly as it will go. And it seems to me that the history of a serving-maid who resists her master’s efforts at seduction and ultimately forces him to marry her is a more sentimental affair than that of a young lady of quality who permits herself to be seduced by a relatively commonplace Lothario. For myself I have always felt inclined to cheer over the success of the one young female rather than to weep for the tribulations of the other. Pamela certainly seems to be the more sporting character of the two. Still, one should perhaps not read Richardson for his sporting quality, and that sort of thing is really no affair of mine. The main point is that Samuel Richardson is still read and read with enthusiasm. I have even met persons who were engrossed by the conversations in the Cedar Parlour of _Sir Charles Grandison_. That Richardson’s tender muse was at times too much for the robuster and more cynical taste of his age is proved by the fact that Fielding’s first famous novel was begun as a parody on the first famous novel of Richardson. By that date the novel of commerce was well on the way to the market and young ladies lying on sofas reading the latest fiction or furiously sending their maids to the circulating libraries for the next five volumes of their latest favourite--such young ladies were familiar features of the social landscape. Literature had, in fact, become a sound, if not an immensely lucrative, proposition. And it is pleasant to think that, happy as he was in everything that he touched, Richardson was not only novelist but printer and publisher and quite a warm business man in either capacity. He was, too, a favourite correspondent and companion of innumerable young ladies who consulted him as to their amatory predicaments and because of that he is not only the first novelist in the modern sense of the word but also the first literary feminist. You might call him an eighteenth-century Henry James and not go so far wrong. At any rate, he stands alone as a modern novelist and had in England neither appreciable imitators nor rivals until the arrival on the scene of the author of the _Barchester Towers_ series. Except for Smollett--whom it is hopeless to expect Anglo-Saxon readers to appreciate or to consume, the main stream of development of the novel passed once more to the Continent of Europe. Smollett begat Captain Marryat, who was one of the greatest of English novelists and is therefore regarded as a writer for boys, Smollett himself being most prized by the purveyors of books called “curious” in second-hand catalogues.