and the confusion of mind that befogs a prig when he is not taken
seriously, do darken the eyes of the author of "those deplorably tedious
lamentations, 'Clarissa' and 'Sir Charles Grandison,'" as Horace Walpole
calls them!

Fielding asks his Muse to give him "humour and good humour." What
novelist was ever so rich in both? Who ever laughed at mankind with so
much affection for mankind in his heart? This love shines in every book
of his. The poor have all his good-will, and in him an untired advocate
and friend. What a life the poor led in the England of 1742! There
never before was such tyranny without a servile insurrection. I remember
a dreadful passage in "Joseph Andrews," where Lady Booby is trying to
have Fanny, Joseph's sweetheart, locked up in prison:--

"It would do a Man good," says her accomplice, Scout, "to see his
Worship, our Justice, commit a Fellow to _Bridewell_; he takes so much
pleasure in it. And when once we ha' 'um there, we seldom hear any more
o' 'um. He's either starved or eat up by Vermin in a Month's Time."

This England, with its dominant Squires, who behaved much like robber
barons on the Rhine, was the merry England Fielding tried to turn from
some of its ways. I seriously do believe that, with all its faults, it
was a better place, with a better breed of men, than our England of to-
day. But Fielding satirized intolerable injustice.

He would be a Reformer, a didactic writer. If we are to have nothing but
"Art for Art's sake," that burly body of Harry Fielding's must even go to
the wall. The first Beau Didapper of a critic that passes can shove him
aside. He preaches like Thackeray; he writes "with a purpose" like
Dickens--obsolete old authors. His cause is judged, and into Bridewell