Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for the way in which Fielding availed himself of the appearance and popularity of Pamela.  And though Richardson would have been superhuman instead of very human indeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, and an extraordinary vein of genius) if he had done otherwise, few have joined him in thinking Joseph a “lewd and ungenerous engraftment.”  We have not ourselves been very severe on the faults of Pamela, the reason of lenity being, among other things, that it in a manner produced Fielding, and all the fair herd of his successors down to the present day.  But those faults are glaring:  and they were of a kind specially likely to attract the notice and the censure of a genial, wholesome, and, above all, masculine taste and intellect like Fielding’s.  Even at that time, libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others, people had not failed to notice that Pamela’s virtue is not quite what was then called “neat” wine—­the pure and unadulterated juice of the grape.  The longueurs and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure.  So Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a male Pamela—­a situation not only offering “most excellent differences,” but in itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be feared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially ludicrous in minor points.  At first he kept the parody very close:  though the necessary transposition of the parts afforded opportunity (amply taken) for display of character and knowledge of nature superior to Richardson’s own.  Later the general opinion is that he, especially inspirited by his trouvaille of Adams, almost forgot the parody, and only furbished up the Pamela-connection at the end to make a formal correspondence with the beginning, and to get a convenient and conventional “curtain.”  I am not so sure of this.  Even Adams is to a certain extent suggested by Williams, though they turn out such very different persons.  Mrs. Slipslop, a character, as Gray saw, not so very far inferior to Adams, is not only a parallel to Mrs. Jewkes, but also, and much more, a contrast to the respectable Mrs. Jervis and Mrs. Warden.  All sorts of fantastic and not-fantastic doublets may be traced throughout:  and I am not certain that Parson Trulliber’s majestic doctrine that no man, even in his own house, shall drink when he “caaled vurst” is not a demoniacally ingenious travesty of Pamela’s characteristic casuistry, when she says that she will do anything to propitiate Lady Davers, but she will not “fill wine” to her in her own husband’s house.