than he would have thought the worse of her for accepting one from him. During Tom’s youth not a few of the finest gentlemen in Europe found a Lady Bellaston in the Czarina Elizabeth, and during his age many more found one in the Czarina Catherine. I have myself a great admiration for nice points of honour—I don’t think you can make them too nice or too fine; but the person who has not been taught them—nay, in whose time they scarcely exist—cannot justly be said to violate them. It seemed perfectly natural to Tom that, when he had money, he should dress out Molly Seagrim, who had none: I do not suppose that it seemed much less natural to him that Lady Bellaston should dress him out when she had money and he had none. A shocking blindness, doubtless; but all blindness is more or less relative.

The more general objections to Mr. Thomas’s character seem to me to proceed from one of the commonest but most uncritical faults of criticism—the refusal to consider what it is that the author intended to give us. It is most certain that Fielding did not intend to give us an Æneas or an Amadis, a Galahad or an Artegal. He meant to give us an extremely ordinary young man in all respects except good luck, good looks, fair understanding, and generous impulses—a young man incapable of doing anything cruel, or, as far as he understood it, mean, but of no very exceptional abilities, rather thoughtless, fond of pleasure, and not extraordinarily nice about its sources and circumstances—a jeune homme sensuel moyen, in short. His concessions to heroic needs consisted in making Tom not only—

“Like Paris handsome, and like Hector brave.”

but a much better fellow than Paris and a much luckier one than Hector.

It seems to me that we have absolutely no business to go beyond these limits and insist that Tom shall be a Joseph or even a Percivale; still less to demand that he shall be a young man of literary and artistic sympathies; least of all that he shall be troubled about his soul either in the manner of Launcelot Smith or in the manner of Francis Neyrac. The late Mr. Kingsley was, and the living M. Bourget is, a very clever man. To them too, especially to the first, fell something of the faculty of creative observation, and neither mixes with it more ephemeral matter than he had a right to mix. But if, when the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are to some future generation what the first before and the first after Christ are to us, some competent critic turns out of a new Herculaneum or Pompeii a box containing Tom Jones, Yeast, and La Terre Promise, I know what his verdict will be.

A very little of the same injustice which has thus weighed upon Tom has involved the divine Sophia; but with this we need hardly concern ourselves at all. It is not necessary that she should be our ideal, or any one’s ideal. But if any one has read and digested the great and famous first chapter of the Sixth Book, which, if not exactly exhaustive of its difficult subject, contains more practical wisdom than the Phædrus and more honest passion than all Stendhal’s treatise De l’Amour, he will admit that she was a worthy object of the feelings it discusses. Perhaps Mr. Jones was not quite worthy of her; it is not the least of her own worthinesses that the fact is extremely unlikely ever to have occurred to her.

For all the rest we have few vituperators. I think indeed with Scott, rather than with my friend Mr. Dobson, that Squire Western ought not to have taken that beating from the Captain; but then I own myself, as Scott probably was, jealous for the honour of the Tory party, to which Mr. Western also belonged. Nobody else is “out” for a moment during the whole of this long and delightful story. Everybody does what he or she ought to have done—I do not mean morally, which might subject me to the censures of the Church and the Schools alike, but according to the probabilities of human nature and the requirements of great art. Fielding cannot introduce the most insignificant character who makes a substantial appearance without finishing the drawing; he cannot send on the merest scene-shifters, the veriest candle-snuffers, and “population of Cyprus,” without impressing upon them natural and distinct personalities. As you turn the pages, the long silent world becomes alive again in all its varied scenes, very much as the old coachyard did when the Bagman’s Uncle took that walk from Edinburgh to Leith after supper. The whole thing is perfectly real, and real without effort. Indeed this extraordinary vitality belongs to the minor characters in almost a greater degree than to the major. There is Miss Western, with her perpetual and yet not the least overdone politics; and her niece Mrs. Fitzpatrick—very ripe and real she; and Mrs. Waters, for