I have never had much doubt myself that the indebtedness existed: though it would be rash, and is unnecessary, to attempt to determine to what extent and in what particular form.
It is by no means so difficult as it may at first sight appear to put oneself very much in the situation of a contemporary reader of _Pamela_, even if one has read it three or four times, provided that a fairly long period has elapsed since the last reading, and that the novels of the preceding age are fairly--and freshly--familiar.

The thing has been in fact done--with unexpected but not in the least deliberate or suspicious success--by the present writer, who has read the book after an interval of some fifteen years and just after reading (in some cases again, in some for the first time) most of the works noticed in the preceding chapter.

The difference of "the new species of writing" (one is reminded of the description of Spenser as "the new poet") is almost startling: and of a kind which Richardson pretty certainly did not fully apprehend when he used the phrase.

In order to appreciate it, one must not only leave out the two last volumes (which, as has been said, the first readers had not before them at all, and had better never have had) but also the second, or great part of it, which they would only have reached after they had been half whetted, half satiated, and wholly bribed, by the first.

The defects of this later part and indeed of the first itself will be duly noticed presently.