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SAMUEL RICHARDSON, 1689-1761

LAURENCE STERNE, 1713-1768

TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT, 1721-1771

Of the other three great novelists of the middle of the eighteenth century-Richardson, Sterne, and Smollettonly Smollett had any personal interest in Horace.

Of Richardson it may be pretty confidently averred that he had no acquaintance with him. A man of little beginnings, who became one of the great booksellers of London, and one of the greatest novelists of England, his education was only what might be obtained in a small country school at that time, and his knowledge of Latin probably never advanced beyond the rudiments. He was in youth an eager reader, but his knowledge of the classical writers was gained through the reading of translations, as may be deduced from a careful perusal of his published letters. His estimate of Cicero, given in his letters to Lady Bradshaigh, is based on Dr. Middleton; and the fact that he compares Lord Orrery with Cicero, and his letters on Swift with the Letters of Cicero, throws light on Richardson's judgment upon writers classical. He has left a curious comment-which was probably written on the spur of the moment, and which did not spring from permanent conviction, but which nevertheless is illuminating when his own field of creation is considered-in a letter to Miss Highmore, written on June 4,

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1 Richardson's Correspondence, ed. by A. L. Barbauld, 1804; Some Unpublished Letters, in Notes and Queries, 4th Series, 1. 285, and 3. 375.

2 April 22, 1752 (Corresp. 6. 166 f.); and the preceding letter from Lady Bradshaigh to Richardson.

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1750.' 'As for the old Romans,' he writes, 'they were abominable fellows, thieves, robbers, plunderers: love of their country they were not satisfied with. They would not allow any other nation to love theirs. . . . Yet from these banditti are our university men, and dramatic writers, to borrow their heroes.' And a bit of the same spirit comes out in a letter from Miss Sarah Fielding to Richardson, in which she tells him: 'We were at dinner with a "hic, hæc, hoc" man. . . . We thought to ourselves, if Mr. R. will bear us, we don't care in how many languages you fancy you despise us.' In another letter to Miss Highmore,3 in which he thanks her for her 'transcriptions and observations from Pliny,' he admits how little he read in his later years, fully occupied as he was with his writing, his business, and his keen observation-especially of the feminine mind, as he saw it unfold itself under that kindly, confidential sympathy of his, that was saved from the worst effects of sentimentality by his sturdy common sense and worldly wisdom. 'As you say,' he writes, 'I should never find time to read the book. What stores of knowledge do I lose, by my incapacity of reading, and by my having used myself to write, till I can do nothing else, nor hardly that. Business too, so pressing and so troublesome.'

The Dutch translator of his Clarissa, Mr. J. Stinstra, had written his first letter to Richardson in Latin, but his second he wrote in very excellent and careful, though stilted, English, that you may read my letters,' he explains, 'without the assistance of any other man.'

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But the strongest evidence of Richardson's complete lack of Latinity lies in his style, which, to quote Mrs.

1 Corresp. 2. 230.

2 Jan. 8, 1748-9 (Corresp. 2. 59-60).

3 1749 or 1750 (Corresp. 2. 223).

4 March, and Dec. 24, 1753 (Corresp. 5. 241).

Barbauld,' 'is as far as possible from that of a scholar. It abounds with colloquial vulgarisms, and has neither that precision, nor that tincture of classic elegance, which is generally the result of an early familiarity with the best models.' It suffices only to suggest in how much the diffuse style of his letter-novels differs from the terse, cutting directness of Swift, the exquisite precision of Addison, and even from the easier style of Steele, and of Richardson's great rival, Fielding.

No conclusion must be drawn from Richardson's frequent use of classical phrases and allusions, but that they were current expressions that had been carried on as a literary tradition from the preceding age of Pope and his friends, and would inevitably be gleaned by any one who joined much in the literary talk of the time. Richardson was was also naturally acquainted with the Aristotelian axiom concerning pity and fear, which he mentions in a discussion of Clarissa with Lady Bradshaigh as 'essentials in a tragic performance,' for this, too, was matter of everyday knowledge to the writers of the eighteenth century.

So, likewise, to the Horatian expressions occasionally to be met with, both in the novels and in the correspondence, no value must be attached, nor must any serious deduction be drawn from them. In Pamela, two wellknown phrases occur, that had their origin in Horace: Pamela, as Mrs. B- writes to Lady Davers that her husband would have distinguished her parents oftener, ‘but that he saw them too much affected with his goodness to bear the honour (as my dear father says in his first

1 A. L. Barbauld's Life of Richardson, in her edition of the Correspondence 1. xxxiii.

2 1749 (Corresp. 4. 219).

3 Letter 13 (Works of Samuel Richardson, with a Prefatory Chapter by Leslie Stephen, 1883, 2. 211): E. 1. 11. 29-30; 18. 112; O. 2. 3. 1-2.

letter) with equalness of temper'; and twice she praises the golden mean. 'But after all,' she writes in her Journal to Miss Darnford,' 'does happiness to a gentleman, a scholar, a philosopher, rest in a greater or lesser income? On the contrary, is it not oftener to be found in a happy competency, or mediocrity? . . . The competency, therefore, the golden mean is the thing.' And later, in a letter to Lady Davers," she says the same thing, "There is a golden mean in everything.' These are the only allusions that occur in the whole of Pamela. There is one quotation from an English translation of the Tenth Ode of the Second Book.3

All other allusions appear in Clarissa; there are none at all in Sir Charles Grandison. To his heroine, Miss Byron, Richardson allows no classical learning; nor does he allow it to Clarissa, though he gives her a polite education, along with her other excellencies; but at the same time he assigns to Miss Howe the duty of explaining why she made no display of it. In her description of Clarissa she tells John Belford: [She] used to say . . . "what can be more disgraceful to a woman than either, through negligence of dress, to be found to be a learned slattern; or, through ignorance of household management, to be known to be a stranger to domestic economy?" Then would she instance to me two particular ladies; one of which, while she was fond of giving her opinion, in the company of her husband and of his learned friends, upon difficult passages in Virgil or Horace, knew not how to put on her clothes with that necessary grace and propriety which should preserve to her the love of her husband and the respect of every other person.' And in the same letter Miss Howe continues: 'Although she

1 Letter 32 (Wks. 2. 404-405): O. 2. 10. 5.

2 Letter 87 (Wks. 3. 277).

3 Letter 20 (Wks. 2. 262).

4 Letter 150 (Wks. 8. 465).

5 Wks. 8. 474.

was well read in the English, French, and Italian poets, and had read the best translations of the Latin classics; yet seldom did she quote or repeat from them, either in her letters or conversation, though exceedingly happy in a tenacious memory; principally through modesty, and to avoid the imputation of that affectation which I have just mentioned.'

The Horatian allusions in Clarissa are of three sorts. First, allusions that are evidently precepts which had got into the common speech of the day; secondly, a quotation from Cowley's translation of one of Horace's Odes,1 and a reference to an observation of his quoted from the Spectator; and, thirdly, direct quotations from the Latin original. The frequent quotations from Horace and other Latin authors in the Brand letters need not be considered as Richardson's.

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The first group of allusions are the most interesting, as they indicate how the mind of Richardson had absorbed the superficial classicism of the day. Clarissa writes to Miss Howe of the good Mrs. Norton, that she 'used to say, from her reverend father, that youth was the time of life for imagination and fancy to work in: then, were a writer to lay by his works till riper years and experience should direct the fire rather to glow than to flame out, something between both might perhaps be produced that would not displease a judicious eye'—a precept that was originally embodied in Horace's advice to the young Piso:*

Si quid tamen olim

Scripseris, in Mæci descendat iudicis aures

Et patris et nostras, nonumque prematur in annum, Membranis intus positis;

1 Letter 15 (Wks. 7. 82).

2 Postscript (Wks. 8. 527).

3 Letter 69 (Wks. 4. 437).

4 A. P. 386-389.

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