The Bohemian barrister and literary hack who had made a love-match half a dozen years before and now had a wife and several children to care for, must have been vastly encouraged by the favorable reception of his first essay into fiction; at last, he had found the kind of literature congenial to his talents and likely to secure suitable renown:  his metier as an artist of letters was discovered, as we might now choose to express it; he would hardly have taken himself so seriously.  It was natural that he should publish the next year a three volume collection of his miscellany, which contained his second novel, “Mr. Jonathan Wild The Great,” distinctly the least liked of his four stories, because of its bitter irony, its almost savage tone, the gloom which surrounds the theme, a powerful, full-length portrayal of a famous thief-taker of the period, from his birth to his bad end on a Newgate gallows.  Mr. Wild is a sort of foreglimpse of the Sherlock Holmes-Raffles of our own day.

Fielding’s wife died this year and it may be that sorrow for her fatal illness was the subjective cause of the tone of this gruesomely attractive piece of fiction; but there is some reason for believing it to be an earlier work than “Joseph Andrews”; it belongs to a more primitive type of story-making, because of its sensational features:  its dependence for interest upon the seamy side of aspects of life exhibited like magic lantern slides with little connection, but spectacular effects.  The satire of the book is directed at that immoral confusion between greatness and goodness, the rascally Jonathan being pictured in grave mock-heroics as in every way worthy—­and the sardonic force at times almost suggests the pen of Dean Swift.

But such work was but a prelude to what was to follow.  When the world thinks of Henry Fielding it thinks of “Tom Jones,” it is almost as if he had written naught else.  “The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling” appeared six years after “Jonathan Wild,” the intermediate time (aside from the novel itself) being consumed in editing journals and officiating as a Justice of the Peace:  the last a role it is a little difficult, in the theater phrase, to see him in.  He was two and forty when the book was published:  but as he had been at work upon it for a long while (he speaks of the thousands of hours he had been toiling over it), it may be ascribed to that period of a man’s growth when he is passing intellectually from youth to early maturity; everything considered, perhaps the best productive period.  His health had already begun to break:  and he was by no means free of the harassments of debt.  Although successful in his former attempt at fiction, novel writing was but an aside with him, after all; he had not during the previous six years given regular time and attention to literary composition, as a modern story-maker would have done under the stimulus of like encouragement.  The eighteenth century audience, it must be borne in mind, was not