as from his own limitations.  Notwithstanding his tedious moralizing and his other defects, Richardson in these three books gave something entirely new to the literary world, and the world appreciated the gift.  This was the story of human life, told from within, and depending for its interest not on incident or adventure, but on its truth to human nature.  Reading his work is, on the whole, like examining the antiquated model of a stern-wheel steamer; it is interesting for its undeveloped possibilities rather than for its achievement.

HENRY FIELDING (1707-1754)

LIFE.  Judged by his ability alone, Fielding was the greatest of this new group of novel writers, and one of the most artistic that our literature has produced.  He was born in East Stour, Dorsetshire, in 1707.  In contrast with Richardson, he was well educated, having spent several years at the famous Eton school, and taken a degree in letters at the University of Leyden in 1728.  Moreover, he had a deeper knowledge of life, gained from his own varied and sometimes riotous experience.  For several years after returning from Leyden he gained a precarious living by writing plays, farces, and buffoneries for the stage.  In 1735 he married an admirable woman, of whom we have glimpses in two of his characters, Amelia, and Sophia Western, and lived extravagantly on her little fortune at East Stour.  Having used up all his money, he returned to London and studied law, gaining his living by occasional plays and by newspaper work.  For ten years, or more, little is definitely known of him, save that he published his first novel, Joseph Andrews, in 1742, and that he was made justice of the peace for Westminster in 1748.  The remaining years of his life, in which his best novels were written, were not given to literature, but rather to his duties as magistrate, and especially to breaking up the gangs of thieves and cutthroats which infested the streets of London after nightfall.  He died in Lisbon, whither he had gone for his health, in 1754, and lies buried there in the English cemetery.  The pathetic account of this last journey, together with an inkling of the generosity and kind-heartedness of the man, notwithstanding the scandals and irregularities of his life, are found in his last work, the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon.

FIELDING’S WORK.  Fielding’s first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), was inspired by the success of Pamela, and began as a burlesque of the false sentimentality and the conventional virtues of Richardson’s heroine.  He took for his hero the alleged brother of Pamela, who was exposed to the same kind of temptations, but who, instead of being rewarded for his virtue, was unceremoniously turned out of doors by his mistress.  There the burlesque ends; the hero takes to the open road, and Fielding forgets all about Pamela in telling the adventures of Joseph and his companion, Parson Adams.  Unlike