Though he was a prolific and versatile writer, Richard Graves is remembered almost exclusively for his first and most successful novel, The Spiritual Quixote; or, The Summer's Ramble of Mr. Geoffry Wildgoose (1773). Characterized by Havelock Ellis as "a comic masterpiece, in its own way among the best of English novels," Graves's sunny romance reflects the pervasive influence of Quixotism in the eighteenth-century English novel--the narrative tradition of Cervantes as mediated by the comic genius of Henry Fielding. But if the novel's protagonist, Geoffry Wildgoose, owes his paternity to Cervantes's doleful knight and to Fielding's great comic hero, Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews (1742), the bucolic environment that shapes him and the incidents and characters he encounters on his travels bear the unmistakable imprint of the author's own experience and personality. Leaving stylistic and formal innovation to more accomplished novelists such as Laurence Sterne, Graves achieved his success in The...