Samuel Richardson (1680-1761) was one of the major English novelists of the eighteenth century. Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison are admired wherever English literature is read, and although Mr. Brissenden is very much to the point in his remark that 'few genuinely great novelists have been so extravagantly praised in their own day and so largely ignored by succeeding generations', he has himself given the best answer as to why Richardson is still so much worth attention. It is true to say that no one who has ever fully surrendered to Richardson's power and charm ever forgets it, and Mr. Brissenden, in making the point that Clarissa is 'the only major work of fiction of tragic dimensions produced during the eighteenth century' renders the whole subject of Richardson's art and outlook almost as exciting as it was to his own time.