ss folk, from murders, bankruptcies, and
railway accidents down to their religious doubts and the psychology of
their love-making.

* * * * *

Against all these adverse circumstances the Novel of Adventure strives
gallantly, and, of late years, with such conspicuous success, that it
is difficult to decide whether the tide of popular inclination has not
turned against the Novel of Manners. This branch of the great
story-telling family has, as we know, a long descent and an
illustrious pedigree, although for our present purpose we need not go
back further than the eighteenth century, to _Gil Blas_ in France and
_Tom Jones_ in England. It will be found that these masterpieces
consist principally of a series of scenes and comical or semi-tragical
situations, rather loosely strung together on the thread of the
experiences undergone by the principal personages. The main object is
not so much ingenuity of plot as the presentation with much humour,
some strokes of caricature, and a touch of pathos, of morals and
manners, of public abuses and private vices, the way of living and
standard of thinking, the distinctive prejudices and ingrained
beliefs, that characterised different classes at a time when their
ideas and habits were often in sharp contrast. The sketches are
admirably done, the conversation is full of wit, the whole work may be
relied upon as a faithful though coarsely drawn picture of
contemporary society. Fielding constantly makes a halt in his
narrative to moralise and discourse ironically with the reader, in a
vein that was reopened a century later by Thackeray, and by him pretty
nearly exhausted, for at any rate it has since been closed.

Mr. Raleigh's book contains a just and discriminating appreciation of
Fielding's place in the line of great novelists, and of the strong
formative influence that his work exercised over the early development
of what is now called Naturalism. This note is struck, as he points
out, in the invocation at the beginning of the thirteenth book of _Tom
Jones_, addressed to Experience, to the inspiration which is derived
from what one has actually seen and known among all sorts and
conditions of men:

'Others before him had seen and known these things, but in
Fielding's pages they are for the first time introduced, with no
loss of reality, to subserve the ends of fiction; common life is
the material of the story, but it is handled h