nanted by virtuous squires and model parsons instead of Arcadian
shepherds, or knight-errants and fair ladies. His imagination is not
exalted beyond the limits of sanity, but only colours the prosaic
realities in accordance with the impulses of a tranquil benevolence. If
the theme be fundamentally similar, it is treated with a far less daring
hand.

Adams is much more closely related to Sir Roger de Coverley, the Vicar
of Wakefield, or Uncle Toby. Each of these lovable beings invites us at
once to sympathise with and to smile at the unaffected simplicity which,
seeing no evil, becomes half ludicrous and half pathetic in this corrupt
world. Adams stands out from his brethren by his intense reality. If he
smells too distinctly of beer and tobacco, we believe in him more firmly
than in the less full-blooded creations of Sterne and Goldsmith. Parson
Adams, indeed, has a startling vigour of organisation. Not merely the
hero of a modern ritualist novel, but Amyas Leigh or Guy Livingstone
himself, might have been amazed at his athletic prowess. He stalks ahead
of the stage-coach (favoured doubtless by the bad roads of the period)
as though he had accepted the modern principle about fearing God and
walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours. His mutton fist and the
crabtree cudgel which swings so freely round his clerical head would
have daunted the contemporary gladiators, Slack and Broughton. He shows
his Christian humility not merely by familiarity with his poorest
parishioners, but in sitting up whole nights in tavern kitchens,
drinking unlimited beer, smoking inextinguishable pipes, and revelling
in a ceaseless flow of gossip. We smile at the good man's intense
delight in a love-story, at the simplicity which makes him see a good
Samaritan in Parson Trulliber, at the absence of mind which makes him
pitch his AEschylus into the fire, or walk a dozen miles in profound
oblivion of the animal which should have been between his knees; but his
contemporaries were provoked to a horse-laugh, and when we remark the
tremendous practical jokes which his innocence suggests to them, we
admit that he requires his whole athletic vigour to bring so tender a
heart safely through so rough a world.

If the ideal hero is always to live in fancy-land and talk in blank
verse, Adams has clearly no right to the title; nor, indeed, has Don
Quixote. But the masculine portraiture of the coarse realities is not
only indicative of intellectual vigo