the vocal art, with which, wandering up and down at wakes and fairs, he cheered the rural nymphs and swains, when upon the green they interweaved the sprightly dance; while he himself stood fiddling and jumping to his own music.  How little now avails his fiddle!  He thumps the verdant floor with his carcass.  Next old Echepole, the sow-gelder, received a blow in his forehead from our Amazonian heroine, and immediately fell to the ground.  He was a swinging fat fellow, and fell with almost as much noise as a house.  His tobacco-box dropt at the same time from his pocket, which Molly took up as lawful spoils.  Then Kate of the Mill tumbled unfortunately over a tombstone, which catching hold of her ungartered stocking, inverted the order of nature, and gave her heels the superiority to her head.  Betty Pippin, with young Roger her lover, fell both to the ground; where, O Perverse Fate! she salutes the earth, and he the sky.[174]

Fielding had shown more than any predecessor the possibilities of fiction in the study of character and the illustration of manners, and to the art of the narrator, he had added that of the dramatist.  The falling of the rug in Molly Seagrim’s bedroom[175] is one of the happiest incidents ever devised, and no doubt suggested to Sheridan the falling of the screen in the “School for Scandal.”  But the chief distinction of Fielding lies in his having carried the novel to a high point as a work of art.  It was the opinion of Coleridge that the “Oedipus Tyrannus,” “The Alchemist,” and “Tom Jones,” were the three most perfect plots ever planned.[176] It is to this excellence of plot—­the subordination of each minor circumstance to the general aim, the skill with which all events are made to lead up to the final denouement—­that Fielding, if any one, deserves the title of the founder of the English novel.  But to give this title to any individual is a manifest injustice.  The novel was developed, not created; and in that development many minds took part.  Short love stories had been made familiar in England by the Italian writers.  Such, also, had been produced by Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Heywood.  Defoe had written novels of adventure, in one of which, at least, is found the combination of a character well drawn and a plot well executed.  In the number of his characters and the complication of his plot, Richardson had surpassed Defoe.  It is the merit of Fielding to have combined in a far greater degree than those who had gone before the characteristic qualities of the novel.  In others we see the promise, in him the fulfilment.

And this was in no respect the result of an accident.  Fielding looked upon his first work as a new attempt in English literature.  “Joseph Andrews” was first intended to be merely a satire on “Pamela.”  But study and reflection on the nature of his work determined Fielding to produce a “prose epic.”  “The epic as well as the drama,” he said in the preface, “is divided into tragedy and