How delightful are the subsidiary characters in the book!  One such is Partridge, the unsophisticated schoolmaster who, when he attends the theater with Tom and hears Garrick play “Hamlet,” thinks but poorly of the player because he only does what anybody would do under the circumstances!  All-worthy and Blifil one may object to, each in his kind, for being conventionally good and bad, but in numerous male characters in less important roles there is compensation:  the gypsy episode, for example, is full of raciness and relish.  And what a gallery of women we get in the story:  Mrs. Honour the maid, and Miss Western (who in some sort suggests Mrs. Nickleby), Mrs. Miller, Lady Bellaston, Mrs. Waters and other light-of-loves and dames of folly, whose dubious doings are carried off with such high good humor that we are inclined to overlook their misdeeds.  There is a Chaucerian freshness about it all:  at times comes the wish that such talent were used in a better cause.  A suitable sub-title for the story, would be:  Or Life in The Tavern, so large a share do Inns have in its unfolding.  Fielding would have yielded hearty assent to Dr. Johnson’s dictum that a good inn stood for man’s highest felicity here below:  he relished the wayside comforts of cup and bed and company which they afford.

“Tom Jones” quickly crossed the seas, was admired in foreign lands.  I possess a manuscript letter of Heine’s dated from Mainz in 1830, requesting a friend to send him this novel:  the German poet represents, in the request, the literary class which has always lauded Fielding’s finest effort, while the wayfaring man who picks it up, also finds it to his liking.  Thus it secures and is safe in a double audience.  Yet we must return to the thought that such a work is strictly less significant in the evolution of the modern Novel, because of its form, its reversion to type, than the model established by a man like Richardson, who is so much more restricted in gift.

Fielding’s fourth and final story, “Amelia,” was given to the world two years later, and but three years before his premature death at Lisbon at the age of forty-nine—­worn out by irregular living and the vicissitudes of a career which had been checkered indeed.  He did strenuous work as a Justice these last years and carried on an efficacious campaign against criminals:  but the lights were dimming, the play was nearly over.  The pure gust of life which runs rampant and riotous in the pages of “Tom Jones” is tempered in “Amelia” by a quieter, sadder tone and a more philosophic vision.  It is in this way a less characteristic work, for it was of Fielding’s nature to be instantly responsive to good cheer and the creature comforts of life.  When she got the news of his death, Lady Mary wrote of him:  “His happy constitution (even when he had, with great pains, half demolished it) made him forget everything when he was before a venison pastry or over a flask of champagne; and I am persuaded