disappeared, or gone
elsewhere--perhaps to excite a Puritan imagination, and create another
incarnation of the old type of masculine vigour in the hero of 'Paradise
Lost.'

FOOTNOTES:

[6] _Contemporary Review_ for August 1876.

_FIELDING'S NOVELS_

A double parallel has often been pointed out between the two pairs of
novelists who were most popular in the middle of our own and of the
preceding century. The intellectual affinity which made Smollett the
favourite author of Dickens is scarcely so close as that which commended
Fielding to Thackeray. The resemblance between 'Pickwick' and 'Humphrey
Clinker,' or between 'David Copperfield' and 'Roderick Random,' consists
chiefly in the exuberance of animal spirits, the keen eye for external
oddity, the consequent tendency to substitute caricature for portrait,
and the vivid transformation of autobiography into ostensible fiction,
which are characteristic of both authors. Between Fielding and Thackeray
the resemblance is closer. The peculiar irony of 'Jonathan Wild' has its
closest English parallel in 'Barry Lyndon.' The burlesque in 'Tom Thumb'
of the Lee and Dryden school of tragedy may remind us of Thackeray's
burlesques of Scott and Dumas. The characters of the two authors belong
to the same family. 'Vanity Fair' has grown more decent since the days
of Lady Bellaston, but the costume of the actors has changed more than
their nature. Rawdon Crawley would not have been surprised to meet
Captain Booth in a spunging-house; Shandon and his friends preserved the
old traditions of Fielding's Grub Street; Lord Steyne and Major
Pendennis were survivals from the more congenial period of Lord Fellamar
and Colonel James; and the two Amelias represent cognate ideals of
female excellence. Or, to take an instance of similarity in detail,
might not this anecdote from 'The Covent Garden Journal' have rounded
off a paragraph in the 'Snob Papers?' A friend of Fielding saw a dirty
fellow in a mud-cart lash another with his whip, saying, with an oath,
'I will teach you manners to your betters.' Fielding's friend wondered
what could be the condition of this social inferior of a mud-cart
driver, till he found him to be the owner of a dust-cart driven by
asses. The great butt of Fielding's satire is, as he tells us,
affectation; the affectation which he specially hates is that of
straitlaced morality; Thackeray's satire is more generally directed
against the particular affectation