Such, however, are the criticisms which Fielding himself has taught people to make, by the very excellence of his success in the earlier novels:  and there is a certain comparative and relative validity in them.  But consider Amelia in itself, and they begin to look, if not positively unfounded, rather unimportant.  Once more, the astonishing truth and variety of scene and character make themselves felt—­even more felt—­even felt in new directions.  The opening prison scenes exceed anything earlier even in Fielding himself, much more in any one else, as examples of the presentation of the unfamiliar.  Miss Matthews—­whom Fielding has probably abstained from working out as much as he might lest she should, from the literary point of view, obscure Amelia—­is a marvellous outline; Colonels James and Bath are perfectly finished studies of ordinary and extraordinary “character” in the stage sense.  No novel even of the author’s is fuller of vignettes—­little pictures of action and behaviour, of manners and society, which are not in the least irrelevant to the general story, but on the contrary extra-illustrate and carry it out.

While, therefore, we must in no way recede from the position above adopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord an even higher place to Fielding.  He relieved the novel of the tyranny and constraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a single or a very limited class of subjects—­for the themes of Pamela and Clarissa to a very large extent, of Pamela and Grandison to a considerable one, and of all three to an extent not small, are practically the same.  He gave it altogether a larger, wider, higher, deeper range.  He infused in it (or restored to it) the refreshing and preserving element of humour.  He peopled it with a great crowd of lively and interesting characters—­endowed, almost without regard to their technical “position in life,” with unlimited possession of life.  He shook up its pillows, and bustled its business arrangements.  He first gave it—­for in matter of prose style Richardson has few resources, and those rather respectable than transporting, and decidedly monotonous—­the attractions of pure literature in form, and in pretty various form.  He also gave it the attraction of pure comedy, only legitimately salted with farce, in such personages as Adams and Partridge; of lower and more farcical, but still admirable comedy in Slipslop and Trulliber and Squire Western; of comedy almost romantic and certainly charming in Sophia; of domestic drama in Amelia; of satiric portraiture in a hundred figures from the cousins (respectable and disreputable), Miss Western and Lady Bellaston, downwards.  He stocked it with infinite miscellanies of personage, and scene, and picture, and phrase.  As has happened in one or two other cases, he carried, at least in the opinion of the present writer, the particular art as far as it will go.  He did not indeed leave nothing for his successors to do—­on the contrary he left them in a sense everything—­for he showed how everything could be done.  But if he has sometimes been equalled, he has never been surpassed:  and it is not easy to see even how he can be surpassed.  For as his greatest follower has it somewhere, though not of him, “You cannot beat the best, you know.”