_ which followed
_Joseph Andrews_ were three years later than _Pamela_ in appearance,
the _Journey from this World to the Next_ which they contain has the
immaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written after
the adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, rather
tedious in parts, and in conception merely a _pastiche_ of Lucian and
Fontenelle: but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewd
satirical observation of human nature. And the very fact that it is a
following of something else is interesting, in connection with the
infinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, _The
Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams_ (1742).

Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for the way in which
Fielding availed himself of the appearance and popularity of _Pamela_.
And though Richardson would have been superhuman instead of very human
indeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, and an
extraordinary vein of genius) if he had done otherwise, few have joined
him in thinking _Joseph_ a "lewd and ungenerous engraftment." We have
not ourselves been very severe on the faults of _Pamela_, the reason of
lenity being, among other things, that it in a manner produced Fielding,
and all the fair herd of his successors down to the present day. But
those faults are glaring: and they were of a kind specially likely to
attract the notice and the censure of a genial, wholesome, and, above
all, masculine taste and intellect like Fielding's. Even at that time,
libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others,
people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite what
was then called "neat" wine--the pure and unadulterated juice of the
grape. The _longueurs_ and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome
preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure. So
Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a _male_
Pamela--a situation not only offering "most excellent differences," but
in itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be
feared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially
ludicrous in minor points. At first he kept the parody very close:
though the necessary transposition of the parts afforded opportunity
(amply taken) for display of character and knowledge of nature superior
to Richardson's own. Later the general opinion is that he, especia