(Samuel), a celebrated English sentimental novel-writer, born in 1688, was bred to the business of a printer, which he exercised all his life with eminence. Though he is said to have understood no language but his own, yet he acquired great reputation by his three epistolary novels, intitled Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, which show an uncommon knowledge of human nature. His purpose being to promote virtue, his pictures of moral excellence are by much too highly coloured; and he has described his favourite characters such rather as we might wish them to be, than as they are to be found in reality. It is also objected by some, that his writings have not always the good effect intended: for that, instead of improving natural characters, they have fashioned many artificial ones; and have taught delicate and refined ladies and gentlemen to despise every one but their own self-exalted persons. But after all that can be urged of the ill-effects of Mr Richardson's novels on weak minds, eager to adopt characters they can only burlesque; a sensible reader will improve more by studying such models of perfection, than of those nearer to the natural standard of human frailty, and where those frailties are artfully exaggerated so as to fix and misemploy the attention on them. A stroke of the palsy carried off Mr Richardson, after a few days illness, upon the 4th of July 1761. He was a man of fine parts, and a lover of virtue; which, for ought we have ever heard to the contrary, he showed in his life and conversation as well as in his writings. Besides the works abovementioned, he is the author of an Aesop's Fables, a Tour through Britain, 4 vols, and a volume of Familiar Letters upon business and other subjects. He is said from his childhood to have delighted in letter-writing; and therefore was the more easily led to throw his romances into that form; which, if it enlivens the history in some respects, yet lengthens it with uninteresting prate, and formalities that mean nothing, and on that account is sometimes found a little tedious and fatiguing.