incidents which make or mar careers and change the course of
literary history. Certain it is that the immediate cause of
Fielding's first story was the effect upon him of the fortunes
of the virtuous Pamela. A satirist and humorist where Richardson
was a somewhat solemn sentimentalist, Fielding was quick to see
the weakness, and--more important,--the opportunity for
caricature, in such a tale, whose folk harangued about morality
and whose avowed motive was a kind of hard-surfaced, carefully
calculated honor, for sale to the highest bidder. It was easy to
recognize that Pamela was not only good but goody-goody. So
Fielding, being thirty-five years of age and of uncertain
income--he had before he was thirty squandered his mother's
estate,--turned himself, two years after "Pamela" had appeared,
to a new field and concocted the story known to the world of
letters as: "The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend
Abraham Adams."

This Joseph purports to be the brother of Pamela (though the
denouement reveals him as more gently born) and is as virtuous
in his character of serving-man as the sister herself; indeed,
he outvirtues her. Fielding waggishly exhibits him in the full
exercise of a highly-starched decorum rebuffing the amatory
attempts of sundry ladies whose assault upon the citadel of his
honor is analogous to that of Mr. B.,--who naturally becomes
Squire Booby in Fielding's hands--upon the long suffering
Pamela. Thus, Lady Booby, in whose employ Joseph is footman,
after an invitation to him to kiss her which has been gently but
firmly refused, bursts out with: "Can a boy, a stripling, have
the confidence to talk of his virtue?"