And even if we can neither commend nor recommend heroes like Tom Jones, such young men really existed, and the likeness is speakingly drawn:  we bear with his faults because of his reality.  Perhaps our verdict may be best given in the words of Thackeray.  “I am angry,” he says, “with Jones.  Too much of the plum-cake and the rewards of life fall to that boisterous, swaggering young scapegrace.  Sophia actually surrenders without a proper sense of decorum; the fond, foolish, palpitating little creature.  ’Indeed, Mr. Jones,’ she says, ‘it rests with you to name the day.’ ...  And yet many a young fellow, no better than Mr. Thomas Jones, has carried by a coup-de-main the heart of many a kind girl who was a great deal too good for him.”

When Joseph Andrews appeared, and Richardson found that so profane a person as Fielding had dared to burlesque his Pamela, he was angry; and his little tea-drinking coterie was warm in his defence; but Fielding’s party was then, and has remained, the stronger.

In his novel of Amelia, we have a general autobiography of Fielding.  Amelia, his wife, is lovely, chaste, and constant.  Captain Booth—­Fielding himself—­is errant, guilty, generous, and repentant.  We have besides in it many varieties of English life,—­lords, clergymen, officers; Vauxhall and the masquerade; the sponging-house and its inmates, debtors and criminals,—­all as Fielding saw and knew them.

The condition of the clergy is more clearly set forth in Fielding’s novels than in the pages of Echard, Oldham, Wood, Macaulay, or Churchill Babington.  So changed was their estate since the Reformation, that few high-born youths, except the weak or lame, took holy orders.  Many clergymen worked during the week.  One, says South, was a cobbler on weekdays, and preached on Sundays.  Wilmot says:  “We are struck by the phenomenon of a learned man sitting down to prove, with the help of logic, that a priest or a chaplain in a family is not a servant,”—­Jeremy Collier:  Essays on Pride and the Office of a Chaplain.

Fielding drew them and their condition from the life.  Parson Adams is the most excellent of men.  His cassock is ten years old; over it he dons a coarse white overcoat, and travels on foot to London to sell nine volumes of sermons, wherewithal to buy food for his family.  He engages the innkeeper in serious talk; he does desperate battle to defend a young woman who has fallen into the hands of ruffians on the highway; and when he is arrested, his manuscript Eschylus is mistaken for a book of ciphers unfolding a dreadful plot against the government.  This is a hit against the ignorance and want of education among the people; for it is some time before some one in the company thinks he saw such characters many years ago when he was young, and that it may be Greek.  The incident of Parson Trulliber mistaking his fellow-priest for a pork-merchant, on account of his coarse garments, is excellent, but will not bear abbreviation.  Adams is splattered by the huge, overfed swine, and ejaculates, “Nil habeo cum porcis; I am a clergyman, sir, and am not come to buy hogs!” The condition of a curate and the theology of the publican are set forth in the conversation between Parson Adams and the innkeeper.