One point only remains, the handling of which may complete a treatment which is designedly kept down in detail.  It has been hinted at already, perhaps more than once, but has not been brought out.  This is the enormous range of suggestion in Fielding—­the innumerable doors which stand open in his ample room, and lead from it to other chambers and corridors of the endless palace of Novel-Romance.  This had most emphatically not been the case with his predecessor:  for Richardson, except in point of mere length, showed little power of expatiation, kept himself very much to the same ground and round, and was not likely to teach anybody else to make excursions.  Indeed Fielding’s breaking away in Joseph Andrews is an allegory in itself.  But, at least with pupils and followers of any wits, there was not even any need of such breaking away from himself, though no doubt there are in existence many dull and slavish attempts to follow his work, especially Tom Jones.  “Find it out for yourself”—­the great English motto which in the day of England’s glory was the motto of her men of learning as well as of her men of business, of her artists as well as of her craftsmen—­might have been Fielding’s:  but he supplemented it with infinite finger-pointings towards the various things that might be found out.  Almost every kind of novel exists—­potentially—­in his Four (the custom of leaving out Jonathan Wild should be wholly abrogated), though of course they do not themselves illustrate or carry out at length many of the kinds that they thus suggest.

And in fact it could not be otherwise:  because, as has been pointed out, while Fielding had no inconsiderable command of the Book of Literature, he turned over by day and night the larger, the more difficult, but still the greater Book of Life.  Not merely quicquid agunt homines, but quicquid sentiunt, quicquid cogitant, whatever they love and hate, whatever they desire or decline—­all these things are the subjects of his own books:  and the range of subject which they suggest to others is thus of necessity inexhaustible.

If there have been some who denied or failed to recognise his greatness, it must be because he has played on these unwary ones the same trick that Garrick, in an immortal scene, played on his own Partridge.  There is so little parade about Fielding (for even the opening addresses are not parade to these good people:  they may disconcert or even disgust, but they do not dazzle them), that his characters and his scenes look commonplace.  They feel sure that “if they had seen a ghost they would have looked in the very same manner and done just as he does.”  They are sure that, in the scene with Gertrude, “Lord, help them! any man—­that is any good man—­that had such a mother would have done exactly the same.”