No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding’s last novel, Amelia.  The author’s great adversary, Johnson—­an adversary whose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personal relations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for Fielding was certainly “a vile Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sort of horrified recoil from the novelist’s easy handling of temptations which were no easy matter to his critic—­was nearly if not quite propitiated by it:  and the enthusiasm for it of such a “cynic” as Thackeray is well known.  Of the very few persons whom it would not be ridiculous to name with these, Scott—­whose competence in criticising his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generally recognised things about him—­inclines, in the interesting Introduction-Dialogue to The Fortunes of Nigel, to put it on a level with Tom Jones itself as a perfectly constructed novel.  But modern criticism has, rightly or wrongly, been more dubious.  Amelia is almost too perfect:  her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be more interesting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes to there being anything to forgive.  Her husband seems to us to prolong the irresponsibility of youth, which was pardonable in Tom, to a period of life and to circumstances of enforced responsibility which make us rather decline to honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a little bit of a fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he is something of a scatterbrain.  Dr. Harrison, whose alternate wrath and reconciliation supply the most important springs of the plot, is, though a natural, a rather unreasonable person.  The “total impression” has even been pronounced by some people to be a little dull.  What there is of truth in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even to summarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two heads.  It is never so easy to arouse interest in virtue as it is in vice:  or in weak and watered vice as in vice rectified (or unrectified) to full strength.  And the old requirement of “the quest” is one which will hardly be dispensed with.  Here (for we know perfectly well that Amelia’s virtue is in no danger) there is no quest, except that of the fortune which ought to be hers, which at last comes to her husband, and which we are told (and hope rather doubtfully) that husband had at last been taught—­by the Fool’s Tutor, Experience—­not utterly to throw away.  But this fortune drops in half casually at the last by a series of stage accidents, not ill-machined by any means, but not very particularly interesting.