clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of the “prose epic” which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose.  The Prose Epic aims at—­and in Fielding’s case has been generally admitted to have hit—­something like the classical unity of main action.  But it borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and divagation of minor and accessory plot:—­not the mere “episode” of the ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare.  It assumes, necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense of the term in which Much Ado About Nothing and A Winter’s Tale are tragi-comedies, and in which Othello itself might have been made one.  And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the importance of Character.  Description and dialogue are rather subordinate to these things than on a level with them—­but they are still further worked out than before.  And there is a new element—­perhaps suggested by the parabasis of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the peculiar method of Swift in A Tale of a Tub.  At various places in his narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters, Fielding as it were “calls a halt” and addresses his readers on matters more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it.  Of this more later:  for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.

The result of all this was Tom Jones—­by practically universal consent one of the capital books of English literature.  It is unnecessary to recapitulate the famous praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, and of others:  and it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complaints which, if they have never found such monumental expression as the praises, have been sometimes widely entertained.  These objections—­as regards interest—­fasten partly on the address-digressions, partly on the great inset-episode of “The Man of the Hill:”  as regards morality on a certain alleged looseness of principle in that respect throughout, and especially on the licence of conduct accorded to the hero himself and the almost entire absence of punishment for it.  As for the first, “The Man of the Hill” was partly a concession to the fancy of the time for such things, partly a following of such actual examples as Fielding admitted—­for it need hardly be said that the inset-episode, of no or very slight connection with the story, is common