marriage, to be as forgiving as Amelia, I fear I must admit that probably
it was so. But Dr. Johnson himself thought little of that.

I am afraid our only way of dealing with Fielding's morality is to take
the best of it and leave the remainder alone. Here I find that I have
unconsciously agreed with that well-known philosopher, Mr. James Boswell,
the younger, of Auchinleck:

"The moral tendency of Fielding's writings . . . is ever favourable to
honour and honesty, and cherishes the benevolent and generous affections.
He who is as good as Fielding would make him is an amiable member of
society, and may be led on by more regulated instructions to a higher
state of ethical perfection."

Let us be as good and simple as Adams, without his vanity and his oddity,
as brave and generous as Jones, without Jones's faults, and what a world
of men and women it will become! Fielding did not paint that unborn
world, he sketched the world he knew very well. He found that
respectable people were often perfectly blind to the duties of charity in
every sense of the word. He found that the only man in a whole company
who pitied Joseph Andrews, when stripped and beaten by robbers was a
postilion with defects in his moral character. In short, he knew that
respectability often practised none but the strictly self-regarding
virtues, and that poverty and recklessness did not always extinguish a
native goodness of heart. Perhaps this discovery made him leniently
disposed to "characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty, that
I," say the author of "Pamela," "could not be interested for any one of
them."

How amusing Richardson always was about Fielding! How jealousy, spite,