introductions and invocations are
absurd. His heroes are men of generous impulses but dissolute lives, and
his women are either vile, or the puppets of circumstance.

ITS TRUE VALUE.--What can redeem his works from such a category of
condemnation? Their rare portraiture of character and their real glimpses
of nature: they form an album of photographs of life as it was--odd,
grotesque, but true. They have no mysterious Gothic castles like that of
Otranto, nor enchanted forests like that of Mrs. Radcliffe. They present
homely English life and people,--_Partridge_, barber, schoolmaster, and
coward; _Mrs. Honor_, the type of maid-servants, devoted to her mistress,
and yet artful; _Squire Western_, the foul and drunken country gentleman;
_Squire Allworthy_, a noble specimen of human nature; _Parson Adams_, who
is regarded by the critics as the best portrait among all his characters.

And even if we can neither commend nor recommend heroes like _Tom Jones_,
such young men really existed, and the likeness is speakingly drawn: we
bear with his faults because of his reality. Perhaps our verdict may be
best given in the words of Thackeray. "I am angry," he says, "with Jones.
Too much of the plum-cake and the rewards of life fall to that boisterous,
swaggering young scapegrace. Sophia actually surrenders without a proper
sense of decorum; the fond, foolish, palpitating little creature. 'Indeed,
Mr. Jones,' she says, 'it rests with you to name the day.' ... And yet
many a young fellow, no better than Mr. Thomas Jones, has carried by a
_coup-de-main_ the heart of many a kind girl who was a great deal too good
for him."

When _Joseph Andrews_ appeared, and Richardson found that so profane a
person as Fielding had dared to burlesque his _Pamela_, he was angry; and
his little tea-drinking coterie was warm in his defence; but Fielding's
party was then, and has remained, the stronger.

In his novel of _Amelia_, we have a general autobiography of Fielding.
Amelia, his wife, is lovely, chaste, and constant. Captain Booth--Fielding
himself--is errant, guilty, generous, and repentant. We have besides in it
many varieties of English life,--lords, clergymen, officers; Vauxhall and
the masquerade; the sponging-house and its inmates, debtors and
criminals,--all as Fielding saw and knew them.

The condition of the clergy is more clearly set forth in Fielding's novels
than in the pages of Echard, Oldham, Wood, Macaulay, or Churchill
Babingto