was Fielding's refusal, in spite of the titles of his books, to
write like an historian with highly individualized and psychological
characterizations that caused his admirer Arthur Murphy to admit in
his "Essay" on Fielding that "Fielding was more attached to the
_manners_ than to the _heart_."[8] He thought Fielding inferior to
Marivaux in revealing the heart just as Johnson, according to
Boswell, preferred Richardson to Fielding because the former
presented "characters of nature" whereas the latter created only
"characters of manners." The author of "A Short Discourse on Novel
Writing" prefixed to _Constantia; or, A True Picture of Human Life_
(1751) went so far as to say that prose fiction may teach more about
the "sources, symptoms, and inevitable consequences" of the passions
than could easily be taught in any other way. The increasingly
subjective and individualized characterization in English fiction
was well supported in contemporary theory.

_The Jewish Spy_, translated from the _Lettres Juives_ (1736-38) of
Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, is an early example of
citizen-of-the-world literature and contains in its five volumes a
"Philosophical, Historical and Critical Correspondence" dealing with
French, English, Italian, and other matters. The work had a European
vogue, and there were at least two English translations, the present
one, issued in 1739, 1744, and 1766, and another, called _Jewish
Letters_, published at Newcastle in 1746. (The Dublin edition of
1753 I have not seen.) Though d'Argens's purpose in Letter 35 may
have been to advertise his own novel, what he had to say is
interesting. Like many others, he could scoff at the heroic romances
and yet borrow and quietly modify the doctrines of _Ibrahim_ and
_Clélie_. He proposed a still more "advanced" _vraisemblance_ and
_decorum_--psychological analysis tinged with cynicism rather than