to his imbecilities; and yet now "Powers so much debilitated could not last long: one half of his time confined to a bed of sickness, the duties of his profession became painful to him. Nature too forcibly told him, he could no longer play the lover, or the hero; and as he was never much indebted to art, she could less assist him under such trying circumstances. He struggled in this manner till the close of the season of 1776, when he was obliged to take entirely to his bed, where he lay under the excruciating pains of gout and rheumatism, till the 10th of January 1777, and then was released from all his labours." PARTICULARS of the LIFE of SAMUEL RICHARDSON. [From Mrs. BARBAULD'S ACCOUNT of his CORRESPONDENCE.] R. Samuel Richardson, · "MR are fancy, within half-an-hour of each other, in the London pestilence of 1665. good woman, of a family not whose name and geniusungenteel; but whose father no English readers, and, it may and mother died in her inbe added, few foreign ones, unacquainted with, is one instance, among innumerable others, of natural talents making their way to eminence, under the pressure of narrow circumstances, the disadvantage of obscure birth, and the want of a liberal education. My father's business was that of a joiner, then more distinct from that of a carpenter than now it is with us. He was a good draughtsman, and under⚫ stood architecture. His skill and ingenuity, and an understanding superior to his business, with his remarkable integri ty of heart and manners, made him personally beloved by several persons of rank, among whom were the duke of Monmouth and the first earl of Shaftsbury, both so noted in our English history. Their known favour for him having, on the duke's attempt on the crown, subjected him to be looked upon • with with a jealous eye, notwithstanding he was noted for a quiet and inoffensive man, he thought proper, on the decollation of the first-named unhappy nobleman, to quit his London business, and to retire to Derbyshire, though to his great detriment; and there I and three other children out of nine were born. I recollect, that I was early noted for having invention. I was not fond of play, as other boys: my school-fellows used to call me Serious and Gravity; and five of them particularly delighted to single me out, either for a walk, or at their fathers' houses, or at mine, to tell them stories, as they phrased it. Some 1 told them, from my reading, as true; others from my head, " as mere invention; of which they would be most fond, and ance: From my earliest youth I had a love of letter-writing: I was not eleven years old when I wrote, spontaneously, a letter to a widow of near fifty, who, pretending to a zeal for religion, and being a constant frequenter of church ordinances, was continually fomenting quar rels and disturbances, by backbiting and scandal, among all her acquaintance. I collected from the scripture texts that made against her. Assuming the style and address of a person often were affected by them. in years, I exhorted her, I exOne of them particularly, I re-postulated with her. But my • member, was for putting me to write a history, as he called it, on the model of Tommy Pots. I now forget what it was, only that it was of a servant-man preferred by a fine young lady (for his goodness) to a lord, who was a libertine. All my • stories carried with them, I am bold to say, an useful moral.' "It is in like manner related of the abbé Prevôt, one of the most affecting of the French novelists, that, when he was among the Carthusians, into which order he had originally entered, he was accustomed to amuse the good fathers with telling them stories of his invention; and once, it is recorded, they sat up the whole night listening to him. But not only our author's inventive turn, the particular mode in which he hand-writing was known. I was challenged with it, and owned the boldness; for she complained of it to my mother with tears. My mother chid me for the freedom taken by such a boy with a woman of her years; but knowing that her son was not of a pert or forward nature, but, on the contrary, shy and bashful, she commended my principles, though she censured the liberty taken.' "Notwithstanding the ill-will which this freedom might draw upon him from individuals, he was, he tells us, a general favourite with young and old. As a bashful and not forward boy, I was an early favourite with all the young women of taste and reading in the neigh bourhood. Half a dozen of exercised it was very early deter-them, when met to work with their needles, used, when they got a book they liked, and thought I should, to borrow me to read to them; their mothers ⚫ sometimes with them; and both mothers and daughters used to be pleased with the observations they put me upon making. lively manner, when sitting in his grotto, with a circle of the best informed women in England about him, who, in after times, courted his society, than in reading to these girls in, it may be, a little backshop, or a mantua-maker's parlour, with a brick-floor. In the mean time, years went on; and the fa ther of Richardson, being disappointed in his views of bringing him up to a profession, it became incumbent on him to chuse a humbler employment, and he fixed upon that of a printer; chiefly, as he informs us, because he thought it would gratify his thirst for reading. He was bound apprentice to Mr. John Wilde, of Stationers-hall, in the year 1706. He did not, however, find. it easy to gratify this thirst, though the stream ran by his lips. I served,' says he, ‘a diligent seven years to it; to a master who grudged every hour to me that tended not to his profit, even of those times of leisure and diversion, which the re'fractoriness of my fellow-servants obliged him to allow them, and I was not more than thirteen, when three of these young wo men, unknown to each other, having an high opinion of my taciturnity, revealed to me their ⚫ love-secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies to write after, or correct, for answers to their lovers' letters: nor did any one of them ever know that I was the secretary to the others. I have been directed to chide, and even repulse, when an offence was either taken or given, at the very time that the heart of the chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing with esteem and affection; and the fair repulser, dreading to be taken at her word, directing this word, or that expression, to be softened or changed. One, highly gratified with her lover's fervour, were usually allowed by other ⚫ and vows of everlasting love, has 'masters to their apprentices. I ⚫ said, when I have asked her 'stole from the hours of rest and direction; I cannot tell you what relaxation, my reading times for to write; but, (her heart on improvement of my mind; and, her lips) you cannot write too being engaged in a correspon kindly; all her fear was only,dence with a gentleman, greatly that she should incur slight for her kindness.' "Human nature is human nature in every class; the hopes and the fears, the perplexities and the struggles, of these low-bred girls in, probably, an obscure village, supplied the future author with those ideas, which, by their gradual development, produced the characters of a Clarissa and a Clementina; nor was he probably happier, or amnsed in a more my superior in degree, and of ample fortune, who, had he lived, intended high things for me; those were all the opportunities I had in my apprenticeship to carry it on. But this little incident I may mention: 1 took care that even my candle was of my own purchasing, that I might not, in the most trifling instance, make my master a sufferer (and who used to call me the pillar of his house), and not to disable myself by by watching or sitting-up, to perform my duty to him in the daytime.' The correspondence with the gentleman just mentioned, must have been of great service to the young apprentice, in gaining that fluency of pen which he was remarkable for, though it appears he was deprived by death of the patronage he expected. Multitudes of letters passed between this gentleman and me; he wrote well, was a master of the epistolary style. Our subjects were various but his letters were mostly narrative, giving me an account of his proceedings, and what befel him in the different nations through which he travelled. 1 could from them, had I been at liberty, and had I at that time thought of writing as I have since done, have drawn great helps: but many years ago, all the let ters that passed between us, by a particular desire of his (lest they should ever be published) were committed to the flames.' "After the expiration of his apprenticeship, our author continued five or six years working as a compositor and corrector of the press to a printing-office, and part of the time as an overseer; and, at length thus working his way upwards into day-light, he took up his freedom, and set up for himself; at first in a court in Fleet-street, from whence, as his business grew more extensive, he removed into Salisbury-court. "Richardson was not one of those who make genius an excuse for idleness. He had been diligent and conscientious as an apprentice, he was assiduous and Îiberal as a master. Besides the proper work of a printer, he did a good deal of business for the booksellers, in writing for them in dexes, prefaces, and, as he styles them, honest dedications. These humble employments tended to facilitate to him the use and ma nagement of the pen. Mr. Richard. son's punctuality, and the honour and generosity of his dealings, soon gained him friends, and his bu siness greatly flourished. He printed, for a while, the True Briton, a periodical paper, published in 1723, under the auspices of the duke of Wharton, who, at that time, was endeavouring to foment a spirit of opposition in the city; and, to gain popularity, became a mem ber of the wax-chandlers company. Richardson, though his principles were very different, was intimate with him, as was also, in early life, Dr. Young. Some of the numbers of the True Briton were prosecuted; but Mr. R. escaped, as his name did not appear. He was engaged some time in printing a newspaper, called The Daily Journal, and afterwards, The Daily Gazetteer. Through the interest of the speaker, Mr. Onslow, he had the printing of the journals of the house of commons, in twenty-six volumes, folio. Mr. Onslow had a great regard for him, and often received him at his house in Ember-court. Polite regards are sometimes more easily obtained than money from the court end of the town. Mr. R. did not find this branch of his business the one which yielded him the quickest returns. He thus writes to his friend Aaron Hill: As to my silence, I have been at one time exceedingly busy in getting ready some volumes of journals, to entitle myself to a 'payment which yet I never had, no, not to the value of a shilling, though the debt is upwards of three thousand pounds, and though I have pressed for it, ⚫ and and been excessively pressed for the want of it.' "He was chosen master of his company, an office, which, in the stationer's company, is not only honourable but lucrative, in 1754; on which occasion one of his friends tells him, that though he did not doubt his going very well through every other part of the duty, he feared his habitual abstemiousness would allow him to make but a very poor figure at the city feasts. His indulgencies were not of the sensual kind-he had, according "By my first wife I had five sons and one daughter; some of them living, to be delightful to the salutary custom of the Lon-prattlers, with all the appear don citizens, a country residence; first at North-end, near Hammersmith, and afterwards at Parsons'sgreen, where he spent the time he could spare from business, and seldom without visitors. He loved to encourage diligence and early rising amongst his journeymen, and often hid a half-crown amongst the letters, so that the first who came to work in a morning might find it. At other times he brought, for the same purpose, fruit from his garden. "Mr. R. was twice married; his first wife was Allington Wilde, his master's daughter; she died in 1731. His second was the sister of Mr. James Leake, bookseller, at Bath, with whom he always maintained a very friendly intercourse this lady survived him. Of his family, history, and the ་ ances of sound health, lively in their features, and promising as to their minds; and the death of one of them, I doubt, accelerating from grief, that of the otherwise laudably afflicted mother. I have had, by my present wife, five girls and one boy; I have buried of these the promising boy, and one girl: four girls I have living, all at present very good; their mother a true and instructing mother to them. "Thus have I lost six sons (all my sons) and two daughters, every one of which, to answer your question, I parted with with the utmost regret. Other heavy deprivations of friends, very near, and very dear, have I also suf'fered. I am very susceptible, I will venture to say, of impressions of this nature. A father, by the accident of a broken thigh, snapped by a sudden jirk, endeavouring to recover a slip passing. many wounds his affectionate na-an honest, a worthy father, I lost ture received in the loss of those dear to him, he thus speaks in a letter to lady Bradshaw, who had been pleading against a melan-through his own yard. My fa choly termination to Clarissa. "Ah! madam; and do you thus call upon me! Forgive an interrupting sigh, and allow me, a short abruption. "I told you, madam, that I have 1801. ther, whom I attended in every stage of his last illness, I long 'mourned for. Two brothers, very dear to me, I lost abroad. A 'friend, more valuable than most brothers, was taken from me. D Ng |