The gods, to curse Pamela with her prayers,
Gave the gilt coach and dappled Flanders mares,
The shining robes, rich jewels, beds of state,
And, to complete her bliss, a fool for mate.
Hill’s lines are somewhat less successful. He dedicated them to “the Unknown Author of Pamela” two months after Richardson had confessed his authorship.
Richardson changes one line in the poem. In Hill’s Works it reads: “Whence public wealth derives its vital course.” Richardson, a more modern man perhaps, reads “public Health.” His emendation, however, improves Hill’s metaphor concerning a blaze which is a pilot pointing out the source of public wealth, which is drunk to prevent gangrene from blackening to the bone. Further reflection led Richardson a year later to change “vital” to “moral.”
Throughout the letters in his introduction, Richardson made changes, all largely stylistic. That Richardson removed the letters from the front of his book in response to criticism -- as Cross[14]
and others have asserted -- is not quite accurate. He removed them from the sixth edition, but put them back in the seventh and eighth; and his alterations show him giving in to criticism only by inches, if indeed his changes to his introduction are not more simply those of any author trimming (and with Richardson, ever so little) his early extravagances.
Richardson’s stubbornness here suggests other reasons for his substituting a table of contents for his introduction in the sixth edition. To print both would have been too prolix, even for Richardson; and it seems that the table of contents, detailing the entire action, together with the change to big quarto volumes, are Richardson’s efforts to authenticate Pamela in the face of Chandler’s and Kelly’s unauthorized sequel, Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, printed to complete the two duodecimo volumes of Richardson’s original story. Richardson’s sixth edition is the first in which his own additional two volumes, written to forestall Chandler and Kelly, are included with the first two as a complete four-volume unit. Twelve years later, in 1754, his true Pamela established, he reverted to his introductory letters. Hill’s death in 1750 may also have moved Richardson to restore the introduction which was chiefly Hill’s work, recalling both his friend and Pamela’s greener days. In the eighth edition, at the end of his life, Richardson still kept the introductory letters, though with some final constrictions.
Richardson makes the first changes to his introduction in the fourth edition. Excepting minor clarifications, all deal with Hill’s answer to the anonymous gentleman. The attitude toward this gentleman has softened. The “rashest of All his Advices”