Let it be to us, for the moment, the story of Pamela up to and including "Mr.B.'s" repentance and amendment of mind: and the "difference" of this story, which fills some hundred and twenty or thirty closely printed, double columned, royal octavo pages in the "Ballantyne Novels," is (despite the awkwardness of such a form for the enjoyment of a novel) almost astounding.
To begin with, the novel-attractions are presented with a completeness which, as has been pointed out in the last chapter, is almost entirely lacking before.

There is, of course, not very much plot, in the martinet sense of that word: there never was in Richardson, despite his immense apparatus and elaboration.

The story is not knotted and unknotted; the wheel does not come full circle on itself; it merely runs along pleasantly till it is time for it to stop, and it stops rather abruptly.
The siege of Pamela's virtue ends merely because the besieger is tired of assaults which fail, and of offering dishonourable terms of capitulation which are rejected: because he prefers peace and alliance.
But such as it is, it is told with a spirit which must have been surprising enough to its readers, and which makes it, I confess, seem to me now much the best _story_ in Richardson.

The various alarums and excursions of the siege itself go off smartly and briskly: there may be more sequence than connection--there is _some_ connection, as in the case of that most unlucky and ill-treated person the Rev.Mr.
Williams--but the sequence is rapid and unbroken, and the constituents of it as it were jostle each other--not in any unfavourable sense, but in a sort of rapid dance, "cross hands and down the middle," which is inspiriting and contagious.

He lost this faculty later: or rather he allowed it to be diluted and slackened into the interminable episodes of the not dissimilar though worse-starred plot against Clarissa, and the _massacrant_ trivialities of the Italian part of _Grandison_.