who followed him and brought him wide acknowledgment. It is notable that American architects who have studied in Europe, especially in Paris, are apt to drift either into a pathless eclecticism or into the English current. Richardson did neither. The Romanesque that he saw in Europe, especially in the middle and south of France, appealed so strongly to his sense for mass and broad picturesqueness that he soon followed its leading, away from the style he had learned in Paris. His earliest work was modern French in style; his first church, in Springfield, a startlingly independent version of English Gothic. Yet half a dozen, buildings made the transition to that derivative of Romanesque to which afterwards in all his buildings he steadfastly adhered. In Trinity church, his first monumental work, perhaps his finest, he broke away absolutely from the prevailing English Gothic fashion. Instead of the long Latin cross with aisles and transepts, he made a wide cross almost Greek in plan, with short arms fifty feet broad and aisles that are only passages, a narthex flanked by two western towers, a nave of one double bay, an eastern arm prolonged into a great apse of the full width of the crossing, .over which sits a massive square tower. The arms of the church are barrel-vaulted in wood; under the great tower is a flat coffered ceiling a hundred feet above the floor. The style, though mixed, shows his surrender to the attraction of the churches in Auvergne, which have furnished the material for the design of the apse. The central tower is a reminiscence of the noble lantern of the old cathedral of Salamanca, but the square outline is insisted on instead of the polygonal, and the forms are in other ways much changed. The alteration of the Capitol at Albany, half a dozen years later, shared with Leopold Eidlitz, was a compromise in style, and so lacks the sure handling of his best work, except in that part of the interior in which he was untrammelled, the Senate Chamber and the great staircase. In the buildings at Pittsburg, on the other hand, he was free from interference, and these satisfied him more than any other of his buildings. His great design for the new cathedral at Albany, an adaptation of the Romanesque forms of Auvergne to a large modern problem, would have displayed his mature manner, and been perhaps his greatest work; but the plan did not lend itself to the tradition or the ritual of the Anglican Church, and it was rejected, to his great disappointment.
At first the breadth of his compositions was offset by a richness of ornament which he afterwards called flamboyant, but there was a continual growth in simplicity. Some of his imitators have abused his example, running into mere baldness and brutality, but his own work never lost the flneness of quality with which he began, nor the adequacy of its detail.
Richardson’s uncommon personality so embodied itself in his works that it cannot be overlooked. He had an inexhaustible energy of body and mind, an enthusiasm more genial than combative, but so abounding and at times vehement that few men and few bodies of men could resist him.
Abounding energy he had, but not health. A serious bodily injury, and later a chronic malady, made his last years a constant struggle with suffering and infirmity, borne with indomitable cheerfulness, but at last fatal.
It is likely that the small number of his designs enhanced their quality. He put twice the labour into his work that the average architect would have given to it, and often twice the time, but the result was apt to be twice as good. He found American architecture restless, incoherent and exuberant; his example did much to turn it back to simplicity and repose. He came as near to establishing a style as it is given to any one man to come; but the tendency of the time was too strong, and the classic styles, reasserting themselves, once more drove out the medieval.
The best known book about Richardson is Mrs Schuyler van Rensselaer’s H. H. Richardson and his Works (Boston, 1888). (W. P. P. L.)
RICHARDSON, SIR JOHN (1787–1865), British naturalist,
was born at Dumfries on the 5th of November 1787. He studied
medicine at Edinburgh, and became a surgeon in the navy in
1807. In 1819 he was appointed surgeon and naturalist to
Franklin’s first arctic expedition (1819–22), and he served in
the same capacity to the second (1825–26). The scientific
results of these expeditions he described in contributions to
Franklin’s Narratives, and especially in the four quarto volumes
of his Fauna Boreali-Americana (1829–37). He was knighted
in 1846, and in the following year was chosen commander of
the Franklin search expedition (1848–49), the journal of which
he published in 1851 under the title of An Arctic Searching
Expedtion. In 1855 he retired to Grasmere, where he died on
the 5th of June 1865. He also wrote accounts dealing with the
natural history, and especially the ichthyology, of several other
arctic voyages, and was the author of Icones Piscium (1843),
Catalogue of Apodal Fish in the British Museum, translated from
the German MS. (1856), the second edition of Yarrell’s History
of British Fishes (1860), and The Polar Regions (1861), expanded
from an article with the same title which he wrote for the Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
A Life by John MacIlraith was published in 1868.
RICHARDSON, SAMUEL (1680–1761), English novelist, is a
notable example of that “late-flowering” sometimes applied
to Oliver Goldsmith. Born under William and Mary, the reign
of the second George was well advanced before, at fifty years of
age, he made his first serious literary effort—an effort which
was not only a success, but the revelation of a new literary form.
He was the son of a London joiner, who, for obscure reasons,
probably connected with Monmouth’s rebellion, had retired to
an unidentified town in Derbyshire, where, in 1689, Samuel was
born. At first intended for holy orders, and having little but
the common learning of a private grammar school—for the
tradition that upon the return of the family to the metropolis
he went to Christ’s Hospital cannot be sustained-he was
eventually, as some compensation for a literary turn, apprenticed
at seventeen to an Aldersgate printer named John Wilde. Here,
like the typical “good apprentice” of his century, he prospered became successively compositor, corrector of the press, and
printer on his own account; married his master’s daughter
according to programme; set up newspapers and books;
dabbled a little in literature by compiling indexes and “honest
dedications,” and ultimately proceeded Printer of the Journals of
the House of Commons, Master of the Stationers’ Company, and
Law-Printer to the King. Like all well-to-do citizens, he had
his city -house of business and his “country box” in the
suburbs; and, after a thoroughly respectable” life, died on
the 4th of July 1761, being buried in St Bride’s Church, Fleet
Street, close to his shop (now demolished), No. 11 Salisbury
Court.
To this uneventful and conventional career one would scarcely look for the birth and growth of a fresh departure in fiction. And yet, although Richardson’s manifestation of his literary gift was deferred for half a century, there is no life to which the Horatian “qualis ab incepto” can be more appropriately applied. From his youth this moralist had moralized from his youth—nay, from his childhood—this letter-writer had written letters; from his youth this supreme delineator of the other sex had been the confidant and counsellor of women. In his boyhood he was secretary-general to all the love-sick girls of the neighbourhood; at eleven he addressed a hortatory epistle, stuffed with texts, to a scandal-loving widow; and whenever it was possible to correspond with any one he was as “corresponding” as even Horace Walpole could have desired. At last, when he was known to the world only as a steady business man, who was also a “dab at an index” and an invaluable compiler of the “puff prefatory,” it occurred to Mr Rivington of St Paul’s Churchyard and Mr Osborn of Paternoster Row, two book selling friends who were aware of his epistolary gifts, to suggest that he should prepare a little model letter-writer for such “country readers" as “were unable to indite for themselves.” Would it be any harm, he suggested in answer, if he should also “instruct them how they should think and act in common cases”?, His friends were all the more anxious that he should
