I had Clarissa with me; and, as soon as they began to read, the whole station was in a passion of excitement about Miss Harlowe, and her misfortunes, and her scoundrelly Lovelace.

The Governor's wife seized the book; the Secretary waited for it; the Chief justice could not read it for tears.' He acted the whole scene; he paced up and down the Athenaeum library.

I dare say he could have spoken pages of the book; of that book, and of what countless piles of others!" An old Scotch doctor, a Jacobin and a free-thinker, who could only be got to attend church by the positive orders of the Governor-General, cried over the last volume until he was too ill to appear at dinner.
[Degenerate readers of our own day have actually been provided with an abridgment of Clarissa, itself as long as an ordinary novel.

A wiser course than buying the abridgment would be to commence the original at the Third volume.

In the same way, if anyone, after obtaining the outline of Lady Clementina's story from a more adventurous friend, will read Sir Charles Grandison, skipping all letters from Italians, to Italians, and about Italians, he will find that he has got hold of a delightful, and not unmanageable, book.] The Chief Secretary,--afterwards, as Sir William Macnaghten, the hero and the victim of the darkest episode in our Indian history,--declared that reading this copy of Clarissa, under the inspiration of its owner's enthusiasm, was nothing less than an epoch in his life.