patterns,
tracings--and go his own way--and the Way of the Novel--with no guidance
but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare
indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old.
It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read
not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not
common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of
the "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by
any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as
a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose. The
Prose Epic aims at--and in Fielding's case has been generally admitted
to have hit--something like the classical unity of main action. But it
borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and
divagation of minor and accessory plot:--not the mere "episode" of the
ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes,
necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense
of the term in which _Much Ado About Nothing_ and _A Winter's Tale_ are
tragi-comedies, and in which _Othello_ itself might have been made one.
And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by
insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far
more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the
importance of Character. Description and dialogue are rather subordinate
to these things than on a level with them--but they are still further
worked out than before. And there is a new element--perhaps suggested by
the _parabasis_ of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the
peculiar method of Swift in _A Tale of a Tub_. At various places in his
narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters,
Fielding as it were "calls a halt" and addresses his readers on matters
more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a
commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it. Of this
more later: for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.

The result of all this was _Tom Jones_--by practically universal consent
one of the capital books of English literature. It is unnecessary to
recapitulate the famous praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, and
of others: and it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complai