HIS PECULIAR POWERS. 35 his longest journey was from his printing office in Salisbury Court to his suburban house at Hammersmith, or at Parson's Green; and in his daily walks in the park or in the streets, he was to be seen, according to his own description sent to a lady, as a neatly-dressed little figure, with his left hand in his bosom, and his right hand holding, rather than using a cane, "looking directly foreright, as passers-by would imagine, but observing all that stirred on either hand of him, without moving his short neck." When, by a kind of accident, he was called upon to tax a faculty for constructing stories, for which he had had a reputation in his boyhood, but which had lain dormant since, this very narrowness of his direct acquaintance with the conventional life and the casual literature of his time, helped him to be inventive and original. Not having ranged, then, over a wide surface of actual life, so as to have accumulated in much variety recollections of actual incidents, physiog nomies, scenes, and characters, to be introduced into his novels, he was obliged in constructing his stories to set out from his experience of human nature in its essential principles (in which experience men may be sound and deep without a very wide acquaintance at first hand with passing manners), and placing certain imagined characters in certain imagined situations, to divine what would take place by their working on together. This is, accordingly, what Richardson does. He places a girl who is to be his heroine, or a man who is to be his hero, in a certain imagined situation, and in imaginary relations to other personages-parents, uncles, aunts, and other ladies and gentlemen close to the family group; he sets these persons in motion, exhibiting slowly in letters which pass among them, their approximations, recessions, and feelings toward each other; from time to time he throws in a fresh incident or a new character to complicate the history; and so on he creeps to the catastrophe or the consummation. His peculiar power consists throughout in the subtle imagination of progressive states of feeling rather than of changing external scenes ; in the minute anatomy of the human heart as worked upon gradually by little alterations of time, place, and motive, rather than in the rapid succession of external visions and surprises. He adheres to his original group of personages, following them hither and thither, when locomotion is necessary, from town to country, and from country back to town, and taking note of such faces as are added to the group during these 36 IMPROBABILITIES OF HIS PLOTS. migrations,—very minute, too, in his descriptions of dress, look, and gesture, as far as these personages are concerned, and of the houses and gardens in which they move; but bringing in no breadth of contiguous life or landscape; and, on the whole, carrying his characters on through the story in a little independent world, with which, whatever the tyranny or the misery within, surrounding society has slight connexions, and does not interfere. This disconnexion of his characters and their history from the surrounding medium in which they are supposed to be moving, is the main cause of whatever improbability or want of truth to fact is charged against Richardson. One feels that a good, shrill shriek from the heroine at her chamber-window, or an appeal by any one in her confidence to the nearest magistrate, or the behaviour of any one of the persons simply as men or women would behave with the British law and British customs of the eighteenth century in operation round about them, would cut the novel short at any point of its progress. Allow Richardson this disconnexion, however, let him have his characters as he fancies them, isolated as he fancies them, and inter-related as he fancies them,- his art in their government is admirable. He writes on and on in a plain, full, somewhat wordy style, not always grammatically perfect; but every page is a series of minute touches, and each touch is from a thorough conception of the case which he is representing. In minute inquisition into the human heart, and especially the female heart, and in the exhibition of conduct as affected day by day by growing complications of feeling and circumstance, Richardson is a master. THE DEATH OF CLARISSA.* [Clarissa Harlowe has been deceived by Lovelace. On her deathbed she is visited by her cousin, Colonel Morden. The scene is described in three letters from Belford to Lovelace.+] M RS Smith stept up and brought us down word, that Mrs Lovick and her nurse were with her; and that she was in so sound a sleep, leaning upon the former in her elbow-chair, that she neither heard her enter the room, nor go out. The colonel begged, if not improper, that he might see her, though sleeping. He said, that his impatience would not let him stay till she awaked. Yet he would not have her disturbed, and should be glad to contemplate her sweet features when she saw not him; and asked, if she thought he could not go in, and come out, without disturbing her. She believed he might, she answered; for her chair's back was towards the door. He said he would take care to withdraw, if she awoke, that his sudden appearance might not surprise her. Mrs Smith, stepping up before us, bid Mrs Lovick and the nurse not stir, when we entered; and then we went up softly together. We beheld the lady, in a charming attitude. Dressed, as I told you before, in her virgin white, she was sitting in her elbow-chair, Mrs Lovick close by her, in another chair, with her left arm round her neck, supporting it as it were; for it seems, the lady had bid her do so, saying she had been a mother to her, and she would delight herself in thinking she was in her mamma's arms; for she found herself drowsy,-perhaps, she said, for the last time she should ever be so. One faded cheek rested upon the good woman's bosom, the kindly warmth of which had overspread it with a faint, but charming blush; the other paler, and hollow, as if already iced over by death. Her hands white as the lily, with her meandering veins more transparently blue than ever * From “Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady," in 7 vols. 1748. 38 A SINGULAR OBJECT. I had seen even hers-veins so soon, alas! to be choked up by the congealment of that purple stream, which already so languidly creeps, rather than flows through them-her hands hanging lifelessly, one before her, the other grasped by the right hand of the kind widow, whose tears bedewed the sweet face which her motherly bosom supported, though unfelt by the fair sleeper; and either insensibly to the good woman, or what she would not disturb her to wipe off, or to change her posture; her aspect was sweetly calm and serene; and though she started now and then, yet her sleep seemed easy; her breath indeed short and quick, but tolerably free, and not like that of a dying person. In this heart-moving attitude she appeared to us when we approached her, and came to have her lovely face before us. The colonel, sighing often, gazed upon her with his arms folded, and with the most profound and affectionate attention, till at last, on her starting and fetching her breath with greater difficulty than before, he retired to a screen that was drawn before her house, as she calls it, which stands under one of the windows. This screen was placed there at the time she found herself obliged to take to her chamber, and in the depth of our concern, and the fulness of other discourse at our first interview, I had forgotten to apprise the colonel of what he would probably see. Retiring thither, he drew out his handkerchief, and, overwhelmed with grief seemed unable to speak; but, on casting his eye behind the screen, he soon broke silence; for, struck with the shape of the coffin, he lifted up a purplish coloured cloth that was spread over it, and, starting back, "Good God," said he, "what's here?" Mrs Smith standing next him, "Why," said he, with great emotion, "is my cousin suffered to indulge her sad reflection with such an object before her?" "Alas! sir," replied the good woman, "who should controul her? We are all strangers about her in a manner; and yet we have expostulated with her upon this sad occasion." "I ought," said I, stepping softly up to him, the lady again falling into a doze, “to have apprized you of this. I was here when it was brought in, and never was so shocked in my life. But she had none of her friends about her, and no reason to hope for any of them to come near her; and assured she should not recover, she was resolved to leave as little as pos i THE COLONEL'S INDIGNATION. 39 sible, especially as to what related to her person, to her executor. But it is not a shocking object to her, though it is to everybody else." "Curse upon the hard-heartedness of those," said he, "who occasioned her to make so sad a provision for herself! What must her reflections have been all the while she was thinking of it, and giving orders about it? And what must they be every time she turns her head towards it? These uncommon geniuses-but indeed she should have been controuled in it, had I been here." The lady fetched a profound sigh, and, starting, it broke off our talk, |