SAMUEL, a celebrated English sentimental Richardson, 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, entitled 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 shone in his life and conversation as well as in his writings. Besides the works above mentioned, he is the author of an Æsop'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.

The most eminent writers of our own country, and even of foreign parts, have paid their tribute to the transcendant talents of Mr Richardson, whose works have been published in almost every language and country of Europe. They have been greatly admired, notwithstanding every dissimilitude of manners, or every disadvantage of translation. The celebrated M. Diderot, speaking of the means employed to move the passions, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry, mentions Richardson as a perfect master of that art: "How striking (says he), how pathetic are his descriptions! His personages, though silent, are alive before me; and of those who speak, the actions are still more affecting than the words."—The famous John-James Rousseau, speaking, in his letter to M. d'Alembert, of the novels of Richardson, affirms, "that nothing was ever written equal to, or even approaching them, in any language."

—Mr Aaron Hill calls his Pamela a "delightful nursery of virtue."—Dr Warton speaks thus of Clementina: "Of all representations of madness, that of Clementina, in the History of Sir Charles Grandison, is the most deeply interesting. I know not whether even the madness of Lear is wrought up, and expressed, by so many little strokes of nature and passion. It is absolute pedantry to prefer and compare the madness of Orestes in Euripides to this of Clementina."—Dr Johnson, in his Introduction to the 97th number of the Rambler, which was written by Mr Richardson, observes, that the reader was indebted for that day's entertainment to an author, "from whom the age has received greater favours, who has enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue;" and, in his life of Rowe, he says, "The character of Lothario seems to have been expanded by Richardson into that of Lovelace; but he has excelled his original in the moral effect of the fiction. Lothario, with gaiety which cannot be hated, and bravery which cannot be despised, retains too much of the spectator's kindness. It was in the power of Richardson alone to teach us at once esteem and detestation; to make virtuous resentment overpower all the benevolence which wit, and elegance, and courage, naturally excite; and to love at last the hero in the villain."—Dr Young very pertinently observed, that Mr Richardson, with the mere advantages of nature, improved by a very moderate progress in education, struck out at once, and of his own accord, into a new province of writing, in which he succeeded to admiration. And what is more remarkable, that he not only began, but finished, the plan on which he set out, leaving no room for any one after him to render it more complete: and that not one of the various writers that have ever since attempted to imitate him, have in any respect equaled, or at all approached near him. This kind of romance is peculiarly his own; and "I consider him (continues the doctor) as a truly great natural genius; as great and supereminent in his way as Shakespeare and Milton were in theirs."

Richardson, Jonathan, a celebrated painter of heads, Walpole's Anecdotes was born about the year 1665, and against his inclination was placed by his father-in-law apprentice to a scrivener of painting in England, with whom he lived six years; when obtaining his freedom by the death of his master, he followed the bent of his disposition, and at 20 years old became the disciple of Riley; with whom he lived four years, whose niece he married, and of whose manner he acquired enough to maintain a solid and lasting reputation, even during the lives of Kneller and Dahl; and to remain at the head of the profession when they went off the stage.

There is strength, roundness, and boldness in his colouring; but his men want dignity, and his women grace. The good sense of the nation is characterized in his portraits. You see he lived in an age when neither enthusiasm nor fervility were predominant. Yet with a pencil so firm, possessed of a numerous and excellent collection of drawings, full of the theory, and profound in reflections on his art, he drew nothing well below the head, and was void of imagination. His attitudes, draperies, and back-grounds, are totally insipid and unmeaning; so ill did he apply to his own practice the fagacious rules and hints he bestowed on others. Though he wrote with fire and judgment, his paintings owed little to either. No man dived deeper into the inexhaustible stores of Raphael, or was more smitten with the native lustre of Vandyck. Yet though capable of raising the elevation of the one and the elegance of the other, he could never contrive to see with their eyes, when he was to copy nature himself. One wonders that he could comment their works so well, and imitate them so little. Richardson. He quitted business himself some years before his death; but his temperance and virtue contributed to protract his life to a great length in the full enjoyment of his understanding, and in the felicity of domestic friendship. He had had a paralytic stroke that affected his arm, yet never disabused him from his customary walks and exercise. He had been in St James's Park, and died suddenly at his house in Queen's-square on his return home, May 28, 1745, when he had passed the 80th year of his age. He left a son and four daughters, one of whom was married to his disciple Mr Hudson, and another to Mr Grigson an attorney. The taste and learning of the son, and the harmony in which he lived with his father, are visible in the joint works they composed. The father in 1719 published two discourses: 1. An Essay on the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting; 2. An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur; bound in one volume octavo. In 1722 came forth An Account of some of the statues, bas-reliefs, drawings, and pictures, in Italy, &c. with Remarks by Mr Richardson, senior and junior. The son made the journey; and from his notes, letters, and observations, they both at his return compiled this valuable work. As the father was a formal man, with a slow, but loud and sonorous voice, and, in truth, with some affectation in his manner; and as there is much singularity in his style and expression, these peculiarities (for they were scarcely foibles) struck superficial readers, and between the laughters and the envious the book was much ridiculed. Yet both this and the former are full of matter, good sense, and instruction: and the very quaintness of some expressions, and their laboured novelty, show the difficulty the author had to convey mere visible ideas through the medium of language. Those works remind one of Cibber's inimitable treatise on the stage: when an author writes on his own profession, feels it profoundly, and is sensible his readers do not, he is not only excusable, but meritorious, for illuminating the subject by new metaphors or bolder figures than ordinary. He is the coxcomb that sneers, not he that instructs, in appropriated diction.

If these authors were censured when conversant within their own circle, it was not to be expected that they would be treated with milder indulgence when they ventured into a finer region. In 1734, they published a very thick octavo, containing explanatory notes and remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost, with the life of the author, and a discourse on the poem. Again were the good sense, the judicious criticism, and the sentiments that broke forth in this work, forgotten in the singularities that distinguished it. The father having said in apology for being little conversant in classic literature, that he had looked into them through his son, Hogarth, whom a quibble could furnish with wit, drew the father peeping through the nether end of a telescope, with which his son was perforated, at a Virgil aloft on a shelf. Yet how forcibly Richardson entered into the spirit of his author, appears from his comprehensive expression, that Milton was an ancient, born two thousand years after his time. Richardson, however, was as incapable of reaching the sublime or harmonious in poetry, as he was in painting, though so capable of illustrating both. Some specimens of verse that he has given us here and there in his works, excite no curiosity for more, though he informs us in his Milton, that Richardson if painting was his wife, poetry had been his secret concubine. It is remarkable, that another commentator of Milton has made the same confession.

Sunt et milii carmina, me quoque dicunt

Vatem pastores

says Dr Bentley. Neither the doctor nor the painter adds sed non ego credulus illis, though all their readers are ready to supply it for both. Besides his pictures and commentaries, we have a few etchings by his hand, particularly two or three of Milton, and his own head. The sale of his collection of drawings, in February 1747, lasted 18 days, and produced about £60l. his pictures about £100l. Hudson his son-in-law bought many of his drawings.