Fielding's work lies on a distinctly lower level of interest. It
is still interesting, or it would not be given here. It still
has--at least that part which here appears seems to its editor to
have--interest intrinsic and "simple of itself." But it is
impossible for anybody who speaks critically to deny that we now
get into the region where work is more interesting because of its
authorship than it would be if its authorship were different or
unknown. To put the same thing in a sharper antithesis, Fielding
is interesting, first of all, because he is the author of Joseph
Andrews, of Tom Jones, of Amelia, of Jonathan Wild, of the
Journal. His plays, his essays, his miscellanies generally are
interesting, first of all, because they were written by Fielding.

Yet of these works, the Journey from this World to the Next
(which, by a grim trick of fortune, might have served as a title
for the more interesting Voyage with which we have yoked it)
stands clearly first both in scale and merit. It is indeed very
unequal, and as the author was to leave it unfinished, it is a
pity that he did not leave it unfinished much sooner than he
actually did. The first ten chapters, if of a kind of satire
which has now grown rather obsolete for the nonce, are of a good
kind and good in their kind; the history of the metempsychoses of
Julian is of a less good kind, and less good in that kind. The
date of composition of the piece is not known, but it appeared in
the Miscellanies of 1743, and may represent almost any period of
its author's development prior to that year. Its form was a very
common form at the time, and continued to be so. I do not know
that it is necessary to assign any very special origin to it,
though Lucian, its chief practitioner, was evidently and almost
avowedly a favorite study of Fielding's. The Spanish romancers,