The works of Fielding may be justly accused of describing immoral scenes and using lewd language; but even in this they are delineative of the manners and conversation of an age in which such men lived, such scenes occurred, such language was used.  I liken the great realm of English prose fiction to some famous museum of art.  The instructor of the young may carefully select what pictures to show them; but the student of English literature moves through the rooms and galleries, gazing, judging, approving, condemning, comparing.  Genius may have soiled its canvas with what is prurient and vile; lascivious groups may stand side by side with pictures of saints and madonnas.  To leave the figure, it is wise counsel to read on principle, and, armed with principle, to accept and imitate the good, and to reject the evil.  Conscience gives the rule, and for every bane will give the antidote.

Of this school and period, Fielding is the greatest figure.  One word as to his career.  Passing through all social conditions,—­first a country gentleman, living on or rather squandering his first wife’s little fortune in following the hounds and entertaining the county; then a playwright, vegetating very seedily on the proceeds of his comedies; justice of the peace, and encountering, in his vocation, such characters as Jonathan Wild; drunken, licentious, unfaithful to his wife, but always—­strange paradox of poor human nature—­generous as the day; mourning with bitter tears the loss of his first wife, and then marrying her faithful maid-servant, that they may mourn for her together,—­he seems to have been a rare mechanism without a governor.  “Poor Harry Fielding!” And yet to this irregular, sinful character, we owe the inimitable portraitures of English life as it was, in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia.

Fielding’s habits, acting upon a naturally weak constitution, wore him out.  He left England, and wandered to the English factory at Lisbon, where he died, in 1754, in the forty-eighth year of his age.

TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT.—­Smollett, the third in order and in rank of the novelists of his age, was born at Cardross, Dumbartonshire, in 1721, of a good family; but he had small means.  After some schooling at Dumbarton and a university career at Glasgow, he was, from necessity, apprenticed to a surgeon.  But as his grandfather, Sir James Smollett, on whom he depended, died, he left his master, at the age of eighteen, and, taking in his pocket a manuscript play he had thus early written,—­The Regicides,—­he made his way to London, the El Dorado of all youths with literary aspirations.  The play was not accepted; but, through the knowledge obtained in the surgery, he received an appointment as surgeon’s mate, and went out with Admiral Vernon’s fated expedition to Carthagena in that capacity, and thus acquired a knowledge of the sea and of sailors which he was to use with great effect in his later writings.