I finished Pamela which I had been reading at Southsea. The last volume is a tedious anticlimax, but otherwise I enjoyed it immensely. One can hardly believe our habits and values will ever seem as incredibly quaint to our descendants as those of our ancestors, thus portrayed, do to us.

The language is too delicious; the men are "sad rakes", the women "of virtuous and amiable disposition", and the degree of what was known as "sensibility" too extraordinary. On every page some benefactor's hand is seized and bathed with tears of gratitude, and the combination of demonstrative, schwärmerei-ish emotions and the greatest formality of manner. They always cried and swooned when conversing with their husbands, but never neglected to call them "Sir" or "Mr B."

It is extremely long and trivially told, but amazingly readable. Pamela's morality is tawdry and commercially expedient to the last degree, but she is redeemed from platitudinous priggishness by a certain sprightliness and one is made sensible of her charm of appearance.