he goes, if _l'Art pour l'Art_ is all the literary law and the prophets.

But Fielding cannot be kept in prison long. His noble English, his
sonorous voice must be heard. There is somewhat inexpressibly
heartening, to me, in the style of Fielding. One seems to be carried
along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting one's self to
every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, of delightful
ease in the motion of the elastic water. He is a scholar, nay more, as
Adams had his innocent vanity, Fielding has his innocent pedantry. He
likes to quote Greek (fancy quoting Greek in a novel of to-day!) and to
make the rogues of printers set it up correctly. He likes to air his
ideas on Homer, to bring in a piece of Aristotle--not hackneyed--to show
you that if he is writing about "characters and situations so wretchedly
low and dirty," he is yet a student and a critic.

Mr. Samuel Richardson, a man of little reading, according to Johnson,
was, I doubt, sadly put to it to understand Booth's conversations with
the author who remarked that "Perhaps Mr. Pope followed the French
Translations. I observe, indeed, he talks much in the Notes of Madame
Dacier and Monsieur Eustathius." What knew Samuel of Eustathius? I not
only can forgive Fielding his pedantry; I like it! I like a man of
letters to be a scholar, and his little pardonable display and
ostentation of his Greek only brings him nearer to us, who have none of
his genius, and do not approach him but in his faults. They make him
more human; one loves him for them as he loves Squire Western, with all
his failings. Delightful, immortal Squire!

It was not he, it was another Tory Squire that called out "Hurray for old
England! Twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Sussex." But it
_was_ Western that talked of "One Acton, that the Story Book says was