Mr. Andrew Lang should give us in a dialogue between dead
authors, a meeting in Hades between the two; it would be worth
any climatic risk to be present and hear what was said; Lady
Mary, who may once more be put on the witness-stand, tells how,
being in residence in Italy, and a box of light literature from
England having arrived at ten o'clock of the night, she could
not but open it and "falling upon Fielding's works, was fool
enough to sit up all night reading. I think "Joseph Andrews"
better than his Foundling"--the reference being, of course, to
"Tom Jones"; a judgment not jumping with that of posterity,
which has declared the other to be his masterpiece; yet not an
opinion to be despised, coming from one of the keenest
intellects of the time. Lady Mary, whose cousin Fielding was,
had a clear eye alike for his literary merits and personal
foibles and faults, but heartily liked him and acted as his
literary mentor in his earlier days; his maiden play was
dedicated to her and her interest in him was more than passing.

The Bohemian barrister and literary hack who had made a love-match
half a dozen years before and now had a wife and several
children to care for, must have been vastly encouraged by the
favorable reception of his first essay into fiction; at last, he
had found the kind of literature congenial to his talents and
likely to secure suitable renown: his metier as an artist of
letters was discovered, as we might now choose to express it; he
would hardly have taken himself so seriously. It was natural
that he should publish the next year a three volume collection
of his miscellany, which contained his second novel, "Mr.
Jonathan Wild The Great," distinctly the least liked of his four
stories, because of its bitter irony, its almost savage tone,