and Smollett.  The books are:  Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe,” “Pamela,” and “Sir Charles Grandison”; Fielding’s “Tom Jones”, “Joseph Andrews,” and “Amelia”; Smollett’s “Peregrine Pickle,” “Humphrey Clinker,” and “Roderick Random.”  There we have the real work of the three great contemporaries who illuminated the middle of the eighteenth century—­only nine volumes in all.  Let us walk round these nine volumes, therefore, and see whether we cannot discriminate and throw a little light, after this interval of a hundred and fifty years, upon their comparative aims, and how far they have justified them by the permanent value of their work.  A fat little bookseller in the City, a rakehell wit of noble blood, and a rugged Scotch surgeon from the navy—­those are the three strange immortals who now challenge a comparison—­the three men who dominate the fiction of their century, and to whom we owe it that the life and the types of that century are familiar to us, their fifth generation.

It is not a subject to be dogmatic upon, for I can imagine that these three writers would appeal quite differently to every temperament, and that whichever one might desire to champion one could find arguments to sustain one’s choice.  Yet I cannot think that any large section of the critical public could maintain that Smollett was on the same level as the other two.  Ethically he is gross, though his grossness is accompanied by a full-blooded humour which is more mirth-compelling than the more polished wit of his rivals.  I can remember in callow boyhood—­puris omnia pura—­reading “Peregrine Pickle,” and laughing until I cried over the Banquet in the Fashion of the Ancients.  I read it again in my manhood with the same effect, though with a greater appreciation of its inherent bestiality.  That merit, a gross primitive merit, he has in a high degree, but in no other respect can he challenge comparison with either Fielding or Richardson.  His view of life is far more limited, his characters less varied, his incidents less distinctive, and his thoughts less deep.  Assuredly I, for one, should award him the third place in the trio.

But how about Richardson and Fielding?  There is indeed a competition of giants.  Let us take the points of each in turn, and then compare them with each other.

There is one characteristic, the rarest and subtlest of all, which each of them had in a supreme degree.  Each could draw the most delightful women—­the most perfect women, I think, in the whole range of our literature.  If the eighteenth-century women were like that, then the eighteenth-century men got a great deal more than they ever deserved.  They had such a charming little dignity of their own, such good sense, and yet such dear, pretty, dainty ways, so human and so charming, that even now they become our ideals.  One cannot come to know them without a double emotion, one of respectful devotion towards themselves, and the other of abhorrence for the herd