Of these _Clarissa_, as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged, diversified, and transposed _Pamela_, in which the attempts of a libertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr.B.upon a young lady of much more than proportionately higher station and qualities than Pamela's, are--as such success goes--successful at last: but only to result in the death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal.
The book is far longer than even the extended _Pamela_; has a much wider range; admits of episodes and minor plots, and is altogether much more ambitious; but still--though the part of the seducer Lovelace is much more important than that of Mr.B .-- it is chiefly occupied with the heroine.

In _Sir Charles Grandison_, on the contrary, though no less than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, the author's principal object is to depict--in direct contrast to Mr.B.and Lovelace--a "Good Man"-- the actual first title of the book, which he wisely altered.

This faultless and insufferable monster is frantically beloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties, the Italian Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron.

The latter of these carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than of any great predilection on his own part) and the piece ends with a repetition, extension, and intensification of the bounties showered upon Pamela by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them.

Only of course "the good man" could never be guilty of Mr.B.'s meditated relapse from the path of rectitude, nor (one may perhaps add) does Miss Byron seem to possess the insinuating astuteness by which Pamela once more "Reconciles the new perverted man," to adapt the last line of _A Lover's Complaint_ to the situation.
_Grandison_, like _Clarissa_, has a much wider range of personage and incident than _Pamela_, and is again double the length of it.