Henry Brooke was a poet, pamphleteer, and playwright of liberal political sentiments and a respectable talent. He is today best remembered for his two minor but important novels of sensibility; one of these, The Fool of Quality (1765-1770), gave new form to the Richardsonian sentimental novel and brought it to a fulfillment of purpose and design exceeded only in Henry Mackenzie's more polished The Man of Feeling of 1771. Brooke's achievement in this uneven but interesting and energetic narrative was rewarded by a popularity that extended well into the nineteenth century, partly because the story was for several generations regarded as among the most effective didactic representations of the ideal effects of human benevolence. John Wesley was so taken by The Fool of Quality that he had it published in a special abridgment of his own in 1781, urging his Methodist followers to study it for its lessons in the...