These works, which, notwithstanding their length, were devoured eagerly as soon as they appeared, are little read at present, and exist rather as historical interpreters of an age that is past, than as present light literature:  they have been driven from our shelves by Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and a host of charming novelists since his day.

Richardson lived the admired of a circle of ladies,—­to whose sex he had paid so noble a tribute,—­the hero of tea-drinkings at his house on Parson’s Green; his books gave him fame, but his shop—­in the back office of which he wrote his novels, when not pressed by business—­gave him money and its comforts.  He died at the age of seventy-two, on the 4th of July, 1761.

He was an unconscious actor in a great movement which had begun in France.  The brilliant theories of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Dalembert—­containing much truth and many heresies—­were felt in England, and had given a new impetus to English intellect; indeed, it is not strange, when we come to consider, that while Richardson’s works were praised in English pulpits, Voltaire and the French atheists declared that they saw in them an advance towards human perfectibility and self-redemption, of which, if true, Richardson himself was unconscious.  From the amours of men and women of fashion, aided by intriguing maid-servants and lying valets, Richardson turned away to do honor to untitled merit, to exalt the humble, and to defy gilded vice.  Whatever were the charms of rank, he has elevated our humanity; thus far, and thus far only, has he sympathized with the Frenchmen who attacked the corruptions of the age, but who assaulted also its faith and its reverence.

HENRY FIELDING.—­The path of prose fiction, so handsomely opened by Richardson, was immediately entered and pursued by a genius of higher order, and as unlike him as it was possible to be.  Richardson still clung to romantic sentiment, Fielding eschewed it; Richardson was a teacher of morality, Fielding shielded immorality; Richardson described artificial manners in a society which he did not frequent, Fielding, in the words of Coleridge, “was like an open lawn on a breezy day in May;” Richardson was a plebeian, a carpenter’s son, a successful printer; Fielding was a gentleman, the son of General Fielding, and grandson of the Earl of Denbigh; Richardson steadily rose, by his honest exertions, to independent fortune, Fielding passed from the high estate of his ancestors into poverty and loose company; the one has given us mistaken views of high life, the other has been enabled, by his sad experience, to give us truthful pictures of every grade of English society in his day from the lord, the squire, and the fop to the thief-taker, the prostitute, and the thief.

Henry Fielding was born on the 22d of April, 1707, at Sharpham Park, Somersetshire.  While yet a young man, he had read Pamela; and to ridicule what he considered its prudery and over-righteousness, he hastily commenced his novel of Joseph Andrews.  This Joseph is represented as the brother of Pamela,—­a simple country lad, who comes to town and finds a place as Lady Booby’s footman.  As Pamela had resisted her master’s seductions, he is called upon to oppose the vile attempts of his mistress upon his virtue.