Fielding had seen life, and his characters were painted from the life with a bold, free hand.  He was a gentleman by birth, and had made acquaintance with society and the town in 1727, when he was a handsome, stalwart young fellow, with high animal spirits and a great appetite for pleasure.  He soon ran himself into debt and began writing for the stage; married, and spent his wife’s fortune, living for a while in much splendor as a country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced condition as a rural justice with a salary of five hundred pounds of “the dirtiest money on earth.”  Fielding’s masterpiece was Tom Jones, 1749, and it remains one of the best of English novels.  Its hero is very much after Fielding’s own heart, wild, spendthrift, warm-hearted, forgiving, and greatly in need of forgiveness.  The same type of character, with the lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in Amelia, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding’s wife.  With Tom Jones is contrasted Blifil, the embodiment of meanness, hypocrisy, and cowardice.  Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of Fielding’s most admirable creations.  For the regulated morality of Richardson, with its somewhat old-grannified air, Fielding substituted instinct.  His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only, and his ideal of character is manliness.  In Jonathan Wild the hero is a highwayman.  This novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock-heroic, and is one of the strongest, though certainly the least pleasing, of Fielding’s writings.

Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a difference.  He was a Scotch ship-surgeon, and had spent some time in the West Indies.  He introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar, in the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had introduced, in Squire Western, the equally national type of the hard-swearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory squire.  Both Fielding and Smollett were of the hearty British “beef-and-beer” school; their novels are downright, energetic, coarse, and high-blooded; low life, physical life, runs riot through their pages—­tavern brawls, the breaking of pates, and the off-hand courtship of country wenches.  Smollett’s books, such as Roderick Random, 1748; Peregrine Pickle, 1751, and Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1752, were more purely stories of broadly comic adventure than Fielding’s.  The latter’s view of life was by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to caricature.  “The generous wine of Fielding,” says Taine, “in Smollett’s hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop.”  A partial exception to this is to be found in his last and best novel, Humphrey Clinker, 1770.  The influence of Cervantes and of the French novelist, Le Sage, who finished his Adventures of Gil Bias in 1735, are very perceptible in Smollett.