this part of the business on young ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm—­Miss Darnford, Miss Howe, Charlotte Grandison—­who are by no means particularly comic and who are sometimes very particularly vulgar.  But of tragedy positive, in the bourgeois kind, he had no small command, and in the middle business—­in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic—­he was wonderfully prolific and facile.  His immense and heart-breaking lengthiness is not mere verbosity:  it comes partly from the artist’s natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently.  As for the unhealthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and not unjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the result of imperfect temperament and breeding:  but it is also as closely connected with his very method as are the merits thereof.  You cannot “consider so curiously” without considering too curiously.  The drawbacks of his work are obvious, and they were likely to be, and were, exaggerated.  But they might be avoided and the merits kept:  nor is it too much to say that the triumphs of the English novel in the last century have been not a little due to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the other.

It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and disobliging to lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatest of Richardson’s works is his successor, caricaturist, and superior—­Fielding.  When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared, the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a not very young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not very good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little work at the Bar, besides living, at least till his marriage and it may be feared later, an exceedingly “rackety” life.  It is not improbable, though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention to prose fiction of a kind.  For, though the Miscellanies which followed Joseph Andrews were three years later than Pamela in appearance, the Journey from this World to the Next which they contain has the immaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written after the adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams.  It is unequal, rather tedious in parts, and in conception merely a pastiche of Lucian and Fontenelle:  but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewd satirical observation of human nature.  And the very fact that it is a following of something else is interesting, in connection with the infinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742).