of the objects of Natural History, collected on the Netherland Expedition of Sir John Franklin; Journal of a Boat Voyage through Rupert's Land; Memoir of Sir John Franklin, British Encyclopædia; Ichthyology, British Encyclopædia; The Polar Regions, 1861; and in conjunction with Dallas, Cobbold, Baird, and White—The Museum of Natural History, published by Mackenzie of Glasgow.—J. O. M'W.
RICHARDSON, Jonathan, a clever English portrait painter and excellent writer on art, was born about 1665, and studied painting under John Riley. He died in Westminster, May 28, 1745. Hudson, the master of Reynolds, was the scholar and son-in-law of Richardson. It is as a writer on art that Richardson is now remembered, although his heads were quite as good as any produced in his time in England. In 1719 he published "An Essay on the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting;" and "An Argument in behalf of the science of a Connoisseur;" which appeared again in 1773, together with a third essay, "The Theory of Painting," published by the writer's son. In 1722 the father and son published "An Account of some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings, and Pictures in Italy," &c. Both the above works abound in admirable observations, and should be in every art-library.—R. N. W.
RICHARDSON, Joseph, poet, was born at Hexham in Northumberland, was entered of St. Peter's college, Cambridge, in 1774; became a student of the Middle temple in 1779; and was called to the bar in 1784. He had a considerable share in the composition of the "Rolliad" and of the "Probationary Odes," and wrote the comedy of the "Fugitives." The friendship of the duke of Northumberland gave him a seat in parliament, and also enabled him to become the proprietor of one-fourth share in Drury Lane theatre. He died 9th June, 1803.—W. J. P.
RICHARDSON, Samuel, one of the founders of the English novel, was born in 1689, in Derbyshire, but wherein that county he always, oddly enough, refrained from mentioning. His father, whose descent was somewhat superior to his trade, had been a joiner in London. Samuel was intended for the church; his father's circumstances, however, did not allow the intention to be executed. According to the ordinary accounts—though in Mr. Cunningham's Hand-book of London he figures as a Blue-coat boy—he received all his education at a village school, and never mastered any language but his own. Constitutionally serious and bashful, he mingled little in the sports of his school-fellows, whom he amused, however, by a talent early developed as a story-teller. His favourite associates were young persons of the opposite sex. He read to them, they made him their confidant, and he wrote their love-letters for them, a companionship and employment which deeply influenced the form and character of his matured works. In his seventeenth year he was apprenticed to a London printer, whose daughter he afterwards married, and while discharging his duties with zeal and success, read and wrote diligently at his few moments of leisure. About six years after the expiry of his apprenticeship he started in business for himself. He printed newspapers, compiled indexes, and so forth, for the booksellers, and by his probity and intelligence secured the favour of Onslow, the speaker of the house of commons, through whose influence the printing of the journals of the house was intrusted to him. Throughout life Richardson was a diligent and prosperous man of business. He was past fifty when he made his first notable appearance as an author. Two friends, booksellers and publishers, one of them bearing a name still well known in "the trade," Mr. Osborne and Mr. Rivington, asked him to write for them a volume of familiar letters. Years before, he had been impressed by a story very similar to that of Pamela's, and of actual occurrence. When he sat down to compose, this story was in the foreground of his mind, and encouraged by the approbation of his wife and daughter, he made it the sole subject of the work, still retaining the epistolary form. The first part of Pamela was written in two months of the winter of 1739-40, and published in the latter year. It was at once signally successful. The romances in vogue before its appearance had been chiefly on the French model—high-flown descriptions of adventure in the realms of an obsolete chivalry; sections of contemporary English life, manners, and character were the groundwork of Pamela. Its morality was much more highly estimated then than now. Sherlock praised Pamela from the pulpit, and Pope declared that it would "do more good than twenty sermons." Not merely in itself, but in its results, moreover, did Pamela form an era in English literature. The earliest of Fielding's novels, Joseph Andrews (1742), was begun as a caricature of Richardson's Pamela. The appearance of a spurious continuation of Pamela led Richardson to undertake the task himself, with not more than the success which usually attends such enterprises. Eight years after the appearance of Pamela was published (1748) the first instalment of "Clarissa Harlowe," generally considered Richardson's masterpiece, and it is of such passages as those which describe Clarissa in the depths of her innocent but terrible abasement, that Sir Walter Scott goes the length of saying—"The reader is perhaps as much elevated towards a pure sympathy with virtue and religion, as uninspired composition can raise him." Haunted by a notion that in pourtraying Lovelace, the villain of "Clarissa Harlowe," he had made a vicious character too fascinating, Richardson chose as the hero of his next and last novel, "Sir Charles Grandison," 1753, a model of every possible virtue; but the work is mainly redeemed from dulness by the character, not of its hero, but of Clementina. After "Sir Charles Grandison" he wrote no more. He was elected in 1754 master of the Stationers' Company. A wealthy man, he had a country villa, first at North End, Fulham, and afterwards at Parson's Green, where, as always, he lived "in a flower garden of ladies" who flattered him. His later years were somewhat clouded by a disease of the nerves. He died on the 4th of July, 1761. In private Richardson was most exemplary, fulfilling all the duties of life, hospitable, friendly, and generous. Vanity was his chief fault. His friend and enthusiastic admirer. Dr. Johnson (for whom he wrote a Rambler, No. 67) confessed that Richardson "had little conversation except about his own works," of which, Sir Joshua Reynolds said of him, "he was always willing to talk, and glad to have them introduced." Richardson's reputation, which was among the highest of his own age, not only in England but on the continent, has suffered with time. His name is much better known than his writings. We smile now at the enthusiastic admiration lavished on them by men so unlike as Johnson, Diderot, and Rousseau. Most modern readers pronounce them insufferable in their tediousness and mawkish sentimentality. Yet by the exercise of gifts rarely found in combination, by great fertility in inventing incidents, by his skilful anatomy of the human heart, by the singular power in which he rivals Defoe of bestowing, through a faithful minuteness of detail, an air of reality on his fictitious scenery and personages, he has gained a place among the classics of the English language, one of which no changes of literary taste and fashion can altogether deprive him. There is a life of Richardson by Mrs. Barbauld prefixed to the selections from his "Correspondence," which she edited in 1803, and an excellent sketch of him as a writer and a man among Sir Walter Scott's Lives of the Novelists. In his sentimental correspondence with Lady Bradshaugh Richardson described himself personally as "short, rather plump than emaciated, about five feet five, of a light brown complexion, smoothish-faced, and ruddy-cheeked."—F. E.
RICHARDSON, Sir Thomas, Lord chief-justice of the common pleas and of the king's bench successively, was the son of a Norfolk clergyman, and was born at Hardwick in that county, in 1569. Called to the bar in 1595, he rose rapidly through recordership and the readership of Lincoln's inn to be chancellor to the queen. Soon after her death he entered the house of commons as member for St. Albans, and was speaker in James I.'s parliament, having in that capacity to demand the judgment of the peers in the impeachment of Bacon. Knighted during the sitting of this parliament, he was appointed in 1626 chief justice of the common pleas, and two years afterwards, when it was proposed to torture Felton, the assassin of the duke of Buckingham, he announced the opinion of the judges that torture was not sanctioned by the law of England. In 1631 he was made chief justice of the king's bench, and died in 1635. Richardson was a good lawyer, but of too jocular a turn to command respect. He has contributed pretty largely to the repertories of legal wit. One of the best-known of his sayings was when he had been congratulated by his friends on his escape from a brickbat thrown at his head by a felon whom he had condemned to death. Happening to stoop at the moment, the brickbat struck his hat only. "You see, now," said Richardson, "if I had been an upright judge I had been slain."—F. E.
RICHARDSON, William, a miscellaneous writer, and a professor in the university of Glasgow, was the son of the parish minister of Aberfoyle, and was born in 1743. He was educated first at the parish school of Aberfoyle, and afterwards at the university of Glasgow, where he took the degree of M.A. On
