Writings.-Joseph Andrews (1742), conceived with the design of turning Pamela into ridicule. Joseph is Pamela's brother, and resists the advances of his mistress, as Pamela had resisted those of her master. Pamela herself is degraded from her moral elevation, and is represented as Lady Booby, whom the parson is compelled to reprove for laughing in church. The strength of the novel is Parson Adams, who is learned, amiable, innocent. He is unsuspectingly simple, absent-minded; declares that he would willingly walk ten miles to fetch his sermon on vanity, merely to convince Wilson of his thorough contempt for the vice; consoles himself for the loss of a Greek author by suddenly recollecting that he could not read it if he had it, because it is dark. He drinks beer, smokes pipes, moralizes, and, when necessary, uses his fists with effect and relish. He is Joseph's friend, and both are models of virtue and excellence. They give and receive many cuffs, have basins flung at their heads, their clothes rent by dogs, their horse stolen, never have any money, are threatened with imprisonment; yet they go merrily on, with thick skins, keen appetites, and potent stomachs. Rude jests, tavern brawls, ludicrous situations, combine to turn the tragic of Richardson into the grotesque.

Jonathan Wild (1743), an account of a famous thief, who turns thief-catcher, and ends his career at the gallows. Its best character is the prison chaplain, who exhorts the condemned man to repent, accepts from him a bowl of punch, because it is nowhere spoken against in Scripture,' then resumes his ghostly admonitions.

Tom Jones (1749), the history of a foundling; his masterpiece. It was written during the first year of his magistrate life, and contains a vast variety of lifelike characters (most of whose faces are red), drawn chiefly from the daily experience of the policebench. Western is a country squire, rich, fond of drink, ignorant, boorish, impatient of contradiction, and given up to every gust of passion; yet he has tenderness and tears, and when the wind changes, can be led like a child. Tom dares to fall in love with his daughter Sophy, who is the joy of my heart, and all the hope and comfort of my age.' Immediately Tom must be thrashed, and Sophy shall be turned out to 'starve and rot in the streets.' She reasons, he storms; she changes her tactics to

man, driving the swine a-field as if he were himself a god, scorning all unseemly and all ungodly conduct.

Perhaps the vice which Richardson chose to delineate does not admit, under modern taste, the slow anatomizing with which he exposes it. Owing, also, to their prolixity and poverty of style, his works have continually decreased in popularity. So essential is excellence of form to permanence of interest.

FIELDING.

Truth to English nature, and sympathy with manly quality, perform in Fielding, to a degree, the work of morality.-Bascom.

Biography.-Born in Somersetshire, in 1707; educated at Eton; studied law at Leyden, but quit 'money-bound' before completing his course; returned to England, and at twenty commenced writing for the comic stage; had abundance of health, plunged into jovial excess, took mischances easily; married at twenty-eight, adored his wife, retired to a small estate left him by his mother, feasted, gave dinners, kept fine horses, a pack of hounds, a magnificent retinue of servants in yellow livery, and in three years spent his inheritance and his wife's fortune; speculated in the Haymarket Theatre, and failed; finished his law studies, was admitted to the Bar in 1740, but was unsuccessful; continued to write for the support of his family, engaged actively in political controversy, always maintaining liberal principles; became a magistrate, destroyed bands of robbers, and earned the 'dirtiest money on earth'; lost his wife while they were struggling on in their worldly difficulties, was almost broken-hearted, and found no relief but in weeping, in concert with her maidservant, for the angel they mutually regretted'; naturally ended by marrying the maid; departed for Lisbon in the summer of 1754,' to restore his failing health, and there died on the 8th of the ensuing October. He had sown to the wind, and he reaped to the whirlwind.

Wednesday, June 23, 1754.-On this day the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld arose, and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doted with a mother-like fondness, guided by nature and passion, and uncured and unhardened by all the doctrine of that philosophical school where I had learned to bear pains and to despise death.'-A Voyage to Lisbon.

Writings.-Joseph Andrews (1742), conceived with the design of turning Pamela into ridicule. Joseph is Pamela's brother, and resists the advances of his mistress, as Pamela had resisted those of her master. Pamela herself is degraded from her moral elevation, and is represented as Lady Booby, whom the parson is compelled to reprove for laughing in church. The strength of the novel is Parson Adams, who is learned, amiable, innocent. He is unsuspectingly simple, absent-minded; declares that he would willingly walk ten miles to fetch his sermon on vanity, merely to convince Wilson of his thorough contempt for the vice; consoles himself for the loss of a Greek author by suddenly recollecting that he could not read it if he had it, because it is dark. He drinks beer, smokes pipes, moralizes, and, when necessary, uses his fists with effect and relish. He is Joseph's friend, and both are models of virtue and excellence. They give and receive many cuffs, have basins flung at their heads, their clothes rent by dogs, their horse stolen, never have any money, are threatened with imprisonment; yet they go merrily on, with thick skins, keen appetites, and potent stomachs. Rude jests, tavern brawls, ludicrous situations, combine to turn the tragic of Richardson into the grotesque.

Jonathan Wild (1743), an account of a famous thief, who turns thief-catcher, and ends his career at the gallows. Its best character is the prison chaplain, who exhorts the condemned man to repent, accepts from him a bowl of punch, because it is nowhere spoken against in Scripture,' then resumes his ghostly admonitions.

Tom Jones (1749), the history of a foundling; his masterpiece. It was written during the first year of his magistrate life, and contains a vast variety of lifelike characters (most of whose faces are red), drawn chiefly from the daily experience of the policebench. Western is a country squire, rich, fond of drink, ignorant, boorish, impatient of contradiction, and given up to every gust of passion; yet he has tenderness and tears, and when the wind changes, can be led like a child. Tom dares to fall in love with his daughter Sophy, who is 'the joy of my heart, and all the hope and comfort of my age.' Immediately Tom must be thrashed, and Sophy shall be turned out to 'starve and rot in the streets.' She reasons, he storms; she changes her tactics to

manager, a victim to temptation, but a sincere penitent; is instinctively generous, as a dog is instinctively affectionate; has a woman's heart in his soldier's body; is devoted to his wife, weeps at thought of her, treasures her words, loves her supremely, with a perennial warmth:

If I had the world, I was ready to lay it at my Amelia's feet; and so Heaven knows, I would ten thousand worlds.'

Amelia is, according to Fielding's idea, the assembly of domestic virtues. She is tender, forgiving, and excessively modest; says: 'Dear Billy, though my understanding be much inferior to yours'; receives a love-letter, throws it away, and says:

'I would not have such a letter in my possession for the universe; I thought my eyes contaminated with reading it.'

Style. Fresh, vigorous, easy, idiomatic, exhibiting a care and refinement altogether unknown to that of Richardson.

Rank.-A masterly observer and painter of human nature as he witnessed it. What he has given us is for the most part his actual experience, illuminated, of course, by his own genius. He declares that if he imagines a feature, it is because he has seen it. He lived through the scenes and characters he has described; saw the world in its hilarity, coarseness, and brutality; saw natural impulse unveiled; saw the turmoil of vanities, follies, lusts, and rancors, naked and uncloaked; saw men of nerve and muscle, full of, warmth and force, with overflowing instincts, jostling and violent, yet liberal, loyal, and joyous. Of what he saw, he drew living pictures. Here lies his preeminence. He announced that his object was faithfully to paint real life. But in doing so, he gathered the harvest and forgot the flowers. Life has its poetry, as well as its prose; its moral heroism, as well as its physical valor; its visions, as well as its bread. Of these less solid and loftier constituents, he had but slight appreciation. Hence his characters are strongly built rather than refined. As a mere observer, he was superior to Richardson and little inferior to Shakespeare, though without any of the poetical qualities of either. Width of sympathy, delicacy of perception, high cast of thought, are wanting. He is the novelist of the lower million; Richardson, of the upper ten thousand. He teaches morality indirectly, in the comic style, which, he maintained, disposes men to be 'more full of good humor and benevolence'; Richardson,

directly, in the serious, tragic style, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.

If the novel be held to include love, satire, humour, observation, genuine portrayal of facts, of living, veritable persons, and skill in the arrangement of plot and incident, he surpasses Richardson, and perhaps is unsurpassed by any other; if, more justly, the ethical tendency, the predominance of character, is the leading index of power in the novelist, to Richardson must be assigned the seat of honor.

Character. Sanguine, affectionate, extravagant, careless, jolly; a drinker, a roisterer, acquainted with the lower orders of all classes, and familiar with the ups and downs of life. His views were those which commend themselves to a man who sees the world as it is, who has no visionary dreams or passionate aspirations, and who has a thoroughly generous nature. Morality, with him, was not a law; yet in his way, he was a moralist. He satirizes vice, excuses, condemns, suggests moral conclusions. His hero is neither a libertine nor an ascetic; he is a full-blooded healthy animal, with respect for the Church so long as it does not break with common sense, but without exaltation or poetic rapture. The novelist, preeminently of authors, records himself in his writings. Not more decisively does a Chinese drawing reveal its nationality than do the works of his imagination reveal the experience and observation out of which that imagination has grown. His heroes and heroines are his ideals, and these must be built of the idealized materials of his actual life and history. Perhaps he had all the best parts of a man, except delicacy and moderation.

Influence. Probably his only legacy to mankind, certainly his chief one, is the picture he has set before us of English society in his generation. We see pretty much what we should have seen as lookers-on. In vindicating the novel against the loftier pretensions of professed historians, he asserted that 'in their productions nothing is true but the names and dates, whereas in mine everything is true but the names and dates.' Without going so far, still, as the novel embodies substantially the remarks of the ablest observers upon their contemporaries, we may admit his claim to be a writer of history, who, more