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CLARISSA.

The Right of Translation is reserved.

BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

CLARISSA

A Nobel

BY SAMUEL RICHARDSON

EDITED BY E. S. DALLAS

AUTHOR OF THE GAY SCIENCE

"The prolixity of Richardson, which, to our giddy
paced time, is the greatest fault of his writing, was
not such a fault to his contemporaries. But a modern
reader may be permitted to wish that Clarissa had
been a good deal abridged at the beginning."

Sir Walter Scott's Memoir of Richardson.

VOL. I

LONDON

TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE ST., STRAND
1868

250. V. 264.

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INTRODUCTION.

ACING up and down the library of the
Athenæum club together, Macaulay and

Thackeray came to talk of Richardson's masterpiece. The great novelist asked the great historian whether he had ever read it. "Not read Clarissa!" cried out Macaulay. "If you have once thoroughly entered on Clarissa, and are infected by it, you can't leave it. When I was in India I passed one hot season at the hills, and there were the Governor-general and the Secretary of government and the Commander-in-chief, and their wives. I had Clarissa with me; and as soon as they began to read it, the whole station was in a passion of excitement about Miss Harlowe and her misfortunes and her scoundrelly Lovelace! The Governor's wife seized the book, and the Secretary waited for it, and the Chief-justice could not read it for tears!"

No one who is familiar with Clarissa can wonder at Macaulay's admiration of it, nor be unprepared

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