the recommendation of a county workhouse, in which the different objects of industry and reformation might be united. The paper also contained numerous suggestions creditable to Fielding's magisterial sagacity, some of which have since been carried into effect. Altogether he appears to have justified the high eulogium passed upon him in the capacity of Justice of the Peace.

The journey to Lisbon was of no avail for the novelist; his poor, shattered constitution had already failed beyond hope of recovery; in fact, it is stated that he was a dying man when he reached the port. He lingered, however, for two months after his arrival, in great suffering, and at length died in the Portuguese capital on the 8th of October, 1754, being then only in his forty-eighth year. It is not too much to say that in that brief span of life Fielding had exhausted both the mental and physical energy of the seventy years allotted to humanity; and when we consider the wearing and excited existence he led in the metropolis, it is almost marvellous that he should have been able to accomplish so much intellectual labour. There is something touching in the fate which compels a man whose genius was so native to the soil of England, to die in a foreign land, away not only from those he loved, but from the scene of his literary triumphs. The last tribute of respect paid to the novelist emanated from the Chevalier de Meyrionnet, French Consul at Lisbon, who not only undertook his interment, but followed his remains to the grave, and celebrated the talents of the deceased in an epitaph. The people of the English Factory in the city also erected a monument to him. In Fielding's absence from England, he was not forgotten by his friend Mr. Allen, who, after his death, educated his children, and bestowed pensions both upon them and their widowed mother. This Mr. Allen was the original of one of Fielding's best and most satisfactory characters.

The title of honour which we have accorded to our author at the outset may

seem to need some justification when it is remembered that Defoe and Richardson were writers at and before the same period, and had produced novels anterior to those of Fielding. Defoe, however, can scarcely be treated as the ordinary novelist, or put into competition with the race of writers of fiction he was rather the fierce polemic and satiric author. In the fictitious element he was, of course, remarkably strong; his art was undoubtedly good, but it was the art of the inventor, and not the narrator. Crusoe was a real creation, but not in the same sense as Tom Jones. He was a greater effort of the imagination, and excites the faculty of wonder in us accordingly to a greater degree; but while Tom Jones was not a being of such strange singularity as Crusoe, he became so realizable to the rest of humanity that his conception must be deemed more admirable from the novelist's point of view. Then, again, Defoe seems to let it be understood, from the general drift of his writings, that he meant them to have a personal interest, that they were to be saturated by his own individuality, that his scorn, his anger, his sorrow, were to shine through them. His energy, his irrepressibility, his misery, all combined to make him one of the strongest writers of his age; but he must yield the palm to Fielding in the art of novel writing. The latter had individuality too, but it was individuality of a higher stamp than Defoe's. It selected human beings not from the imagination, but from the species itself, and the types are as unmistakeably real, and more true, though not so astounding in conception to the general consciousness.

With regard to Richardson, though, as we have said, it was the fashion at one time to extol him as the superior of Fielding, this is a position which has now been abandoned by the best critics. The man in possession has necessarily always the advantage of the man who is desirous to succeed him, and Fielding, having written one novel in imitation of his predecessor, had to struggle for some time against that fact, which was continually

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hurled against him. Richardson was evidently a man of high moral principle; indeed, he always strikes us as a perfect compendium of innocence and the virtues. We are willing not to see in him what others have seen, merely the priggish moralist, but he comes terribly near earning that character. Yet let us not be unjust to him. His "Pamela" is a very original work, and its author deserves no small meed of praise for daring to make it a pure one in an age so strikingly celebrated for vice. But the fact that Richardson commenced to write at fifty years of age, precludes the idea of his having possessed lofty creative genius: talent may slumber, as in his case, but genius never. some respects, "Clarissa" is a stronger novel than the one which preceded it, but here again it is difficult to avoid the idea that we are in church, listening to the homilies of the clergyman. The spiritual psychologist is at work again; he is flinging his code of morals at us on every page. We could admire the strength of his virtuous characters without the endless panegyrics upon morals to which we are treated, but we implore in vain. The strings of conscience were what Richardson desired to lay hold upon, and to do this he thought it necessary to follow both virtue and vice from their very inception, and to write as it were their autobiography. How powerfully he has done this let his characters of Clarissa and Lovelace testify. But the permanent impression remaining is that, in spite of his acknowledged power and Puritanical tendencies, he is not one who loves his fellow-men so much as one who would wish to see them made better by the rigid exercise of those virtues to the exposition of which he has devoted his talents. Courage, talent, purity, all these Richardson exhibits, but little genius.

How greatly dissimilar to him was Fielding! Inheriting the frailties of humanity, and feeling himself bound

up with its joys and sorrows, he was gifted with a mind incredibly rich in resource, Richardson had some of the

weaker elements of woman's nature mingled with his own, but Fielding had its real tenderness, its compassion. Tripped up repeatedly by his follies, his nature never hardened; he was the same genial spirit as ever. Betwixt the chariot of excess and the stool of repentance a great portion of his time seems to have been passed. He had the voice of mirth for those who wished to rejoice, and the tears of sympathy for those who were called upon to suffer. He flung no sermons at the head of men and women overtaken in their sins, though he never wrote one book wherein he failed to let it be gathered that he honoured virtue and scourged vice. He was not the kind of man to be the favourite of Richardson. More mag

nanimous than the latter, though not so severe in his morality, his knowledge of humanity was at once wider and deeper, and he could gauge it to its greatest depths. His invention and his naturalness were far superior to those of Richardson. His mind was more plastic, his wit keener, his intellect altogether of a superior order. He had, in one word, what Richardson lacked, genius. In his boyhood the marvellous gift began to develop itself, and in after years it achieved its greatest results with the apparent ease by which the operations of genius are often attended. In Richardson there burned the lambent flame which neither surprises nor destroys; in Fielding there was the veritable lightning of soul. These, then, are some of the reasons why we have assigned to Fielding the right to be considered our first great novelist but others will be apparent as we proceed.

It is fair to assume that, to a very large extent, those works which attain the widest celebrity must be national in their character-that is, must bear an unmistakeable impress of the national genius upon them. See how that is borne out. Shakspeare, Bunyan, and Fielding in England, Goethe in Germany, Voltaire in France, have each produced individual works in their various languages which have acquired world-wide celebrity. And are not

all those works imbued with national characteristics? Do we not find the strength, and at the same time the singular mobility and elasticity of the English mind developed in the writings of the three authors whom we have named? Are not the speculative thought and transcendentalism of Germany adequately embodied in Goethe? Does not Voltaire sum up in himself the force, the point, the fickleness, and the scepticism, which lie at the core of the French character? An English Voltaire, or a French Goethe, is a sheer impossibility. We feel it to be so in the very nature of things. And with respect to Fielding, he has taken root in foreign soil because of his distinctly national character, and yet, at the same time, cosmopolitan genius, as genius in its highest form must always be. We have no writer to whom we can point who excels Fielding in the art of setting out his characters by means of strong, broad lights and shadows. The drawing is masterly and accurate. And nothing deters him from telling the whole truth. He is full of a sublime candour. His narrative is no mere record of events, but personal history of the most effective description. Whoever comes in the way of his pencil must submit to the most rigorous and unflinching representation. However great, rich, or powerful, he will be drawn exactly as he is--himself, the veritable man, or, as Cromwell wished to be limned, with the warts on his face. We are getting, through these observations, to the secret of the success of "Tom Jones." It is marked by the characteristics to which we have been referring, and all the world has acknowledged the truthfulness of the work. Where is the novel in existence which has reached so many corners of society?

As it is considered, and with reason, its author's masterpiece, we may well devote some space to its examination. Notwithstanding its vast popularity, it is regarded in two lights by opposing classes of readers. The first, those who are overcome by its wonderful power, have no eye for blemishes; the second, those who are afraid of seeing plain truths

stated in a plain way, and men and women represented with their masks off, have nothing for it but terms of reproach, on the ground of what they call its indecency. With the exception. of certain phrases which are redolent of the period at which Fielding wrote, it is one of the purest books in our literature. Pure, we affirm, in its general tendency; and surely that is the way in which any work should be regarded. If we adopt the objectionable principle of selecting words and phrases which are obnoxious to the sensitive ear, and from them forming an adverse opinion, what will become of some of the finest effusions of Chaucer and Shakspeare, whom these same purists doubtless cherish most closely? We are inclined to agree with the distinguished critic who asserted that the man who read "Tom Jones and declared it an essentially evil book, must be already corrupt. Of course, to the evil there is a ministry of evil, which can find sustenance everywhere, turning even good so that it may become food for their debased natures. But to a really healthy nature we can conceive no ill accruing from an acquaintance with this novel. It is but fair, however, in a matter upon which there is some difference of opinion, to hear the author himself speak before delivering judgment. In dedicating "Tom Jones to Lord Lyttelton, Fielding trusts that he will find in it nothing whatever that is prejudicial to religion and virtue; nothing inconsistent with the strictest rules of decency, or which could offend the chastest eye. It was obvious that the author had little fear that he would be charged with indecency, and he goes on to declare that goodness and innocence had been his sincere endeavour in writing the history. Further, besides painting virtue in the best colours at his command, he was anxious to convince men that their true interests lay in the pursuit of her. What more exalted end could an author have in his work than this? and we are bound to affirm that, read in the right spirit, the novel has fulfilled its writer's original intentions. He has no scruple in laugh

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ing men out of their follies and meannesses, for he is a satirist as well as a romancist. But throughout the work he has done nothing contrary to the rules which a great artist is bound to follow. The book is indeed full of overwhelming excellences in this respect of art. Look how each character is painted in! There is no scamping with the humblest individual honoured by reproduction on the canvas. The same truthfulness to life which we find in the portraits of Mr. Allworthy and Sophia Western we find in the depiction of a maid or a man-servant at an inn. the enthusiasm which is as necessary to art as is the air we breathe to humanity, he labours at the minutest details till he brings all to perfection. Then the story appears rounded and complete, with no patchwork to mar its artistic effect. Dr. Warburton gave expression to our novelist's merits in this regard excellently when he said: "Monsieur de Marivaux, in France, and Mr. Fielding in England, stand the foremost among those who have given a faithful and chaste copy of life and manners; and by enriching their romance with the best part of the comic art, may be said to have brought it to perfection."

M. Taine, whose criticism may too often be described as the sound of "a rushing mighty wind," never exhibited his faults and his excellences more strikingly than he does in his observations upon Fielding. Nearly always vigorous, and endowed with a jerky, but oftentimes an admirably epigrammatic, force, the French critic is now and then erratic in his judgments. His eye travels faster than his mind. He perceives, and writes what he perceives before he has given full time for reflection. For instance, he says in describing Fielding: "You are only aware of the impetuosity of the senses, the upwelling of the blood, the effusion of tenderness, but not of the nervous exaltation and poetic rapture. Man, such as you conceive him, is a good buffalo; and perhaps he is the hero required by a people which is itself called John Bull." This is a smart use of a synonym, but one

incorrect both as regards what the individual novelist supplies, and what the nation demands. The whole gist of M. Taine's complaint against Fielding is that he wants refinement. "In this abundant harvest with which you fill your arms, you have forgotten the flowers." But Fielding is quite as refined as Cervantes, to whom the critic awards the possession of that excellence. Let anyone who wishes to be convinced that Fielding possesses refinement read the chapter in "Tom Jones" which gives a description of Sophia. There will be found both the poetry and the grace which M. Taine desires. But the critic has misrepresented Fielding, in other respects. Not only has he declared the author to be without natural refinement, but he has denied it to all his characters. After the lapse of more than a hundred years, the character of Sophia Western stands forth one of the purest, sweetest, and most attractive in literature. We seem to see the very bloom of health upon her cheek, a bloom only equalled by the perfections of her mind-not so much intellectual perfections simply as those other virtues and charms which make woman the idol of man. Compare this character with those which crowd too many of the novels of the present day. How absurd are the latter as living representations, and stiff as wooden puppets in the hands of their literary parents! Tinged with false sentiments, lacking in real femininity, they form as great a contrast as could be imagined to the true woman we find depicted in Sophia Western :

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'Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say her body thought.'

This dainty conceit of Dr. Donne's exactly expresses the most perfect heroine drawn by Fielding. In Jones himself, too, we may discover some traces of that refinement which lifts a man out of the merely animal category. The namby-pamby element was entirely absent from him, and he was in the habit of calling a spade a spade-a habit much in vogue at the time in

which his life was fixed. We should join in the verdict delivered by Mr. Allworthy, after he had carefully studied Jones's character-viz., "in balancing his faults with his perfections, the latter seemed rather to preponderate." It must not be forgotten that Fielding never intended to depict a perfect hero; he would have shuddered at the thought. Whilst he "would nothing extenuate, or set down aught in malice," he at the same time never failed to place in full relief-with not a shadow less or more than they deserved-all the characters which he took upon himself to delineate. Remembering this, we feel at once how admirably he fulfilled his task in the picture of Western, the jolly, rollicking squire. Had he softened in any degree the violence, prejudice, passion, and boisterousness attaching to this man, its value as a faithful picture of a Somersetshire squire would have been utterly destroyed. He is no worse than Falstaff, and why should we yield to the one conception the merit we deny to the other? But the world has within its keeping all characters which have been truly realized, and will not let them die. There is much of the bull in Western's constitution; and it is meant that there should be, for he is typical. Fielding's power has lain principally in supplying types. Other portraits are drawn in "Tom Jones" (besides those we have named) with remarkable skill. There is Mr. Allworthy, upon whom the author has laboured with affectionate zeal, and who appears as one of the most finished specimens of his class of humanity. He has the generous heart which prompts to benevolent deeds, and the ready hand to carry out what that heart dictates. He is himself a strong protest against the assertion that Fielding takes no thought of virtue as regards its inculcation upon others, for one instinctively feels that he is purposed by the author to be represented as a being worthy of imitation. Precisely the opposite lesson is intended to be taught by the portrait of Blifil. The villainy of this character is singularly striking, and when the

book is closed, the reader will admit that he has followed the fortunes of but few beings who have been rendered more despicable in his eyes. This unredeemed scoundrel, whose meanness is matched only by his cowardice, is flayed alive according to his deserts. And yet the novelist has exercised no prejudice in the matter; he has simply turned the heart inside out, and made its fetid character apparent to the world. There is no artistic bungling, because there has been no attempt to tamper with the character. Fielding has allowed knavery to show itself, just as on the same page he keeps open the way for innocence and virtue.

The genius of Fielding was not strongly developed until the appearance of " Joseph Andrews," which, as is well known, preceded the publication of "Tom Jones." Before the production of his first novel, the talents of this great wit and humourist seem to have been devoted to the hurried writing of brilliant dramatic and other pieces, which had in them but little positive assurance of a lasting fame. One can well understand, however, what a flutter the launching of "Joseph Andrews" must have caused in London society. The author's leading idea was to write a story in imitation of the style and manners of Cervantes; and it was his intention therein to set forth the folly of affectation, which he regarded as the only true source of the ridiculous. Great vices, he considered, were the proper objects of detestation, and smaller faults of pity; but affectation held its own place aloof from both. Referring to the scope of his work, he has the following remarks: "Perhaps it may be objected to me that I have, against my own rules, introduced vices, and of a very black kind, into this work. To which I shall answer: first, that it is very difficult to pursue a series of human actions, and keep clear from them. Secondly, that the vices to be found here are rather the accidental consequences of some human frailty or foible, than causes habitually existing in the mind. Thirdly, that they are never set