ABSTRACT
I am glad to hear your work is what you call long. I am excessively impatient to see it. And shall certainly think it too short, as I did Clarissa, although it should run out into seven folios. The world will think so too, if it is sufficiently larded with facts, incidents, adventures, &c. The generality of readers are more taken with the driest narrative of facts, if they are facts of any importance, than with the purest sentiments, and the noblest lessons of morality. Now, though you write above the taste of the many, yet ought it not to be, nay, is it not, your chief design, to benefit the many? But how can you cure their mental maladies, if you do not so wrap up your physic as to make it pass their palates? I know of nothing more unpalatable to most men than morality and religion. They will not go down, if they are not either well peppered and salted with wit, or all alive from end to end with action. Therefore stuff your works with adventures, and wedge in events by way of primings, especially when wit and humour happen to be scarce, as sometimes they will be; for a man cannot have them for calling. They come like the rivers, without calling, or come not at all. But it is no hard matter to invent a story when you please. I am glad you have a bad woman, but sorry she does not shew herself. Is this natural? Did you ever know a bad woman that did not make a figure in her way? No, no; the devil always takes care that his confessors of that sex canonize themselves.
