nce loses his self-command, and, like inferior writers, begins to
be angry with his creatures. Instead of analysing and explaining, he
simply reviles and leaves us in presence of a moral anomaly. Blifil is
not more wicked than Iago, but we seem to understand the psychical
chemistry by which an Iago is compounded; whereas Blifil can only be
regarded as a devil (if the word be not too dignified) who does not
really belong to this world at all. The error, though characteristic of
a man whose great intellectual merit is his firm grasp of realities, and
whose favourite virtue is his downright sincerity, is not the less a
blemish. Hatred of pedantry too easily leads to hatred of culture, and
hatred of hypocrisy to distrust of the more exalted virtues. Fielding
cannot be just to motives lying rather outside his ordinary sphere of
thought. He can mock heartily and pleasantly enough at the affectation
of philosophy, as in the case where Parson Adams, urging poor Joseph
Andrews, by considerations drawn from the Bible and from Seneca, to be
ready to resign his Fanny 'peaceably, quietly, and contentedly,'
suddenly hears of the supposed loss of his own little child, and is
called upon to act instead of preaching. But his satire upon all
characters and creeds which embody the more exalted strains of feeling
is apt to be indiscriminate. A High Churchman, according to him, is a
Pharisee who prefers orthodoxy to virtue; a Methodist a mere
mountebank, who counterfeits spiritual raptures to impose upon dupes; a
Freethinker is a man who weaves a mask of fine phrases, under which to
cover his aversion to the restraints of religion. Fielding's religion
consists chiefly of a solid homespun morality, and he is more suspicious
of an excessive than of a defective zeal. Similarly he is a hearty Whig,
but no revolutionist. He has as hearty a contempt for the cant about
liberty[13] as Dr. Johnson himself, and has very stringent remedies to
propose for regulating the mob. The bailiff in 'Amelia,' who, whilst he
brutally maltreats the unlucky prisoners for debt, swaggers about the
British Constitution, and swears that he is 'all for liberty,' recalls
the boatman who ridiculed French slavery to Voltaire, and was carried
off next day by a pressgang. Fielding, indeed, is no fanatical adherent
of our blessed Constitution, which, as he says, has been pronounced by
some of our wisest men to be too perfect to be altered in any
particular, and which a number o