ABSTRACT
If a copy drawn with the most exquisite skill, and heightened with the nicest touches of art, can be allowed merit equal to a justly admired original, the Memoirs of Miss Bidulph may deservedly claim a place in our esteem with the histories of Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. They are characterized by the same elegant fluency of narrative, the same interesting minuteness, inimitable simplicity, delicacy of sentiment, propriety of conduct, and irresistible pathos, which render them indisputably the best models in this species of writing, perhaps the most engaging, persuasive, and difficult of any other. Memoirs written in the epistolary manner, necessarily appear prolix and redundant; to imitate nature more closely, the reader is withheld from the principal events by a thousand little previous formalities, which, though they exert his patience at the time, fully recompense it in the end, by marking the characters more strongly, and introducing a variety of natural circumstances, that cannot fall under the pen of an historian. Slight strokes, and gentle touches, seemingly frivolous and impertinent, have an astonishing effect in strengthening the resemblance of the portraiture. Under correction of the critics, we must profess ourselves admirers of this kind of dramatic writing; where every character speaks in his own. person, utters his feelings, and delivers his sentiments warm from the heart. It admits of an infinity of natural moral reflections, which a true biographer cannot, without pedantry and seeking the occasions, introduce. To sustain with propriety all the different personages, to think, to act in their peculiar characters thro’ a whole life, checquered with prosperity and adversity, requires a truly dramatic genius. If the writer is not confined to the unities of time and place, he labours under other inconveniencies, from which the strict dramatist is exempted. He supports a character through life, the other only through one particular action; he observes probability in the transactions possibly of half a century, the other only of a day; he must rouse the passions, and engage the attention through a variety of unconnected incidents, the dramatist directs his whole strength only to one object; in a word, the memoir writer must be minute, without being tedious; he must study variety, and yet be perfectly simple and natural; he must extend without enervating his characters, rise gradually to his catastrophe, unfold his design slowly, and, after running a long course, appear vigorous, fresh, and unexhausted. It is sufficient proof of the difficulty of this method of writing, that
the ingenious inventive lady, to whom the Memoirs of Miss Bidulph are attributed, hath not been able to avoid imitation. Her heroine is a type of Miss Clarissa Harlowe, involved like her in a passion which she cannot gratify consistently with the dictates of filial duty, and rigid female delicacy. Faulkland is a composition of features borrowed from Grandison and Lovelace: possessed of the strict honour, the steadiness and integrity of the former, he sometimes delights in the stratagem of the latter. But the characters will best appear from a sketch of the narrative.
