After struggling heroically
against every form of artifice and violence, she was at last drugged and
ruined. She died of a broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse,
was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. _Sir Charles Grandison_,
1753, was Richardson's portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose
stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a
bore and a prig. All these novels were written in the form of letters
passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson's
subjective cast of mind. He knew little of life, but he identified
himself intensely with his principal character and produced a strong
effect by minute, accumulated touches. _Clarissa Harlowe_ is his
masterpiece, though even in that the situation is painfully prolonged,
the heroine's virtue is self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is
something almost ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she
pours herself out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the
very moment when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized, and
driven nearly mad. In Richardson's novels appears, for the first time,
that sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature.
_Pamela_ was translated into French and German, and fell in with the
current of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau's
_Nouvelle Heloise_, 1759, and Goethe's _Leiden des Jungen Werther_,
which set all the world a-weeping in 1774.
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