ection. I remember
a dreadful passage in "Joseph Andrews," where Lady Booby is trying to
have Fanny, Joseph's sweetheart, locked up in prison:--

"It would do a Man good," says her accomplice, Scout, "to see his
Worship, our Justice, commit a Fellow to _Bridewell_; he takes so much
pleasure in it. And when once we ha' 'um there, we seldom hear any more
o' 'um. He's either starved or eat up by Vermin in a Month's Time."

This England, with its dominant Squires, who behaved much like robber
barons on the Rhine, was the merry England Fielding tried to turn from
some of its ways. I seriously do believe that, with all its faults, it
was a better place, with a better breed of men, than our England of to-
day. But Fielding satirized intolerable injustice.

He would be a Reformer, a didactic writer. If we are to have nothing but
"Art for Art's sake," that burly body of Harry Fielding's must even go to
the wall. The first Beau Didapper of a critic that passes can shove him
aside. He preaches like Thackeray; he writes "with a purpose" like
Dickens--obsolete old authors. His cause is judged, and into Bridewell
he goes, if _l'Art pour l'Art_ is all the literary law and the prophets.

But Fielding cannot be kept in prison long. His noble English, his
sonorous voice must be heard. There is somewhat inexpressibly
heartening, to me, in the style of Fielding. One seems to be carried
along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting one's self to
every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, of delightful
ease in the motion of the elastic water. He is a scholar, nay more, as
Adams had his innocent vanity, Fielding has his innocent pedantry. He
likes to quote Greek (fancy quoting Greek in a novel of to-day!) and to
make the rogues of printers set it up correctly. He likes to air his
ideas on Homer, to bring in a piece of Aristotle--not hackneyed--to show
you that if he is writing about "characters and situations so wretchedly
low and dirty," he is yet a student and a critic.

Mr. Samuel Richardson, a man of little reading, according to Johnson,
was, I doubt, sadly put to it to understand Booth's conversations with
the author who remarked that "Perhaps Mr. Pope followed the French
Translations. I observe, indeed, he talks much in the Notes of Madame
Dacier and Monsieur Eustathius." What knew Samuel of Eustathius? I not
only can forgive Fielding his pedantry; I like it! I like a man of
letters to