In the first place, it is essentially an artificial rather than an artful plan--its want of verisimilitude, as soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as that of either of the others if not greater.

In the second, without immense pains, it must be "gappy and scrappy," while the more these pains are taken the more artificial it will become.

In the third, the book is extremely likely, in the taking of these pains and even without them, to become intolerably lengthy and verbose.

In the first part at least of the first part of _Pamela_, Richardson avoided these dangers fairly if not fully; in the second part he succumbed to them; in his two later novels, though more elaborate and important plots to some extent bore up the expansion, he succumbed to them almost more.

Pains have been taken above to show how the first readers of _Pamela_ might rejoice in it, because of its contrast with the character of the seventeenth-century novel which was most read--the Scudery or "heroic" romance.