maturity; everything considered, perhaps the best productive
period. His health had already begun to break: and he was by no
means free of the harassments of debt. Although successful in
his former attempt at fiction, novel writing was but an aside
with him, after all; he had not during the previous six years
given regular time and attention to literary composition, as a
modern story-maker would have done under the stimulus of like
encouragement. The eighteenth century audience, it must be borne
in mind, was not large enough nor sufficiently eager for an
attractive new form of literature, to justify a man of many
trades like Fielding in devoting his days steadily to the
writing of fiction. There is to the last an effect of the gifted
amateur about him; Taine tells the anecdote of his refusal to
trouble himself to change a scene in one of his plays, which
Garrick begged him to do: "Let them find it out," he said,
referring to the audience. And when the scene was hissed, he
said to the disconsolate player: "I did not: give them credit
for it: they have found it out, have they?" In other words, he
was knowing to his own poor art, content if only it escaped the
public eye. This is some removes from the agonizing over a
phrase of a Flaubert.

Like the preceding story, "Tom Jones" has its center of plot in
a life history of the foundling who grows into a young manhood
that is full of high spirits and escapades: likable always, even
if, judged by the straight-laced standards of Richardson, one
may not approve. Jones loves Sophia Western, daughter of a
typical three-bottle, hunting squire: of course he prefers the
little cad Blifil, with his money and position, where poor Tom
has neither: equally of course Sophia (whom the reader heartily