--on
the contrary he left them in a sense everything--for he showed how
everything could be done. But if he has sometimes been equalled, he has
never been surpassed: and it is not easy to see even how he can be
surpassed. For as his greatest follower has it somewhere, though not of
him, "You cannot beat the best, you know."

One point only remains, the handling of which may complete a treatment
which is designedly kept down in detail. It has been hinted at already,
perhaps more than once, but has not been brought out. This is the
enormous range of suggestion in Fielding--the innumerable doors which
stand open in his ample room, and lead from it to other chambers and
corridors of the endless palace of Novel-Romance. This had most
emphatically not been the case with his predecessor: for Richardson,
except in point of mere length, showed little power of expatiation, kept
himself very much to the same ground and round, and was not likely to
teach anybody else to make excursions. Indeed Fielding's breaking away
in _Joseph Andrews_ is an allegory in itself. But, at least with pupils
and followers of any wits, there was not even any need of such breaking
away from himself, though no doubt there are in existence many dull and
slavish attempts to follow his work, especially _Tom Jones_. "Find it
out for yourself"--the great English motto which in the day of England's
glory was the motto of her men of learning as well as of her men of
business, of her artists as well as of her craftsmen--might have been
Fielding's: but he supplemented it with infinite finger-pointings
towards the various things that might be found out. Almost every kind of
novel exists--potentially--in his Four (the custom of leaving out
_Jonathan Wild_ should be wholly abrogated), though of course they do
not themselves illustrate or carry out at length many of the kinds that
they thus suggest.

And in fact it could not be otherwise: because, as has been pointed out,
while Fielding had no inconsiderable command of the Book of Literature,
he turned over by day and night the larger, the more difficult, but
still the greater Book of Life. Not merely _quicquid agunt homines_, but
_quicquid sentiunt, quicquid cogitant_, whatever they love and hate,
whatever they desire or decline--all these things are the subjects of
his own books: and the range of subject which they suggest to others is
thus of necessity inexhaustible.

If there have been some who denied or faile