treatise," said
Wesley to his people, "as the most excellent in its kind that I have
seen either in the English or any other language. * * * It perpetually
aims at inspiring and increasing every right affection; at the
instilling gratitude to God and benevolence to man. And it does this
not by dry, dull, tedious, precepts, but by the liveliest examples that
can be conceived; by setting before your eyes one of the most beautiful
pictures that ever was drawn in the world. The strokes of this are so
delicately fine, the touches so easy, natural, and affecting, that I
know not who can survey it with tearless eyes, unless he has a heart of
stone. I recommend it, therefore, to all those who are already, or who
desire to be, lovers of God and man." It was not as a good novel that
Wesley either enjoyed or republished the "Fool of Quality." He
recommended it for the excellence of its moral, and the "Fool of
Quality" would have been allowed to slumber forever on Methodist
book-shelves, had it not been revived by a man who was an equally good
judge of a moral and a work of fiction.

But, in regard to this novel, it must be admitted that Charles
Kingsley's judgment was seriously at fault. He saw both its qualities
and its faults, but he did not realize that a good purpose will not
make up for a poor execution. The causes of the neglect of the book,
said the Canon in his preface, are to be found "in its deep and grand
ethics, in its broad and genial humanity, in the divine value which it
attaches to the relations of husband and wife, father and child, and to
the utter absence, both of that sentimentalism and that superstition
which have been alternately debauching of late years the minds of the
young. And if he shall have arrived at this discovery, he will be able
possibly to regard at least with patience those who are rash enough to
affirm that they have learnt from this book more which is pure, sacred,
and eternal, than from any which has been published since Spenser's
'Fairy Queen.'"[195] On the testimony of Wesley and of Kingsley, all
the merits of a moral nature which they claim for the "Fool of Quality"
will readily be accorded to it. But it is very doubtful that such
qualities would necessarily interfere with the success of a work of
fiction. The real reason why very few who can help it will read this
novel, lies in those characteristics which Kingsley himself admitted
would appear to the average reader. "The plot is extrava