considerably. The opinion of Scott found little in Jonathan Wild
to praise, but then it is evident from what he says, that Scott
missed the point of the satire. [Footnote: Henry Fielding in
Biographical and Critical Notices of Eminent Novelists. "It is not
easy to see what Fielding proposed to himself by a picture of
complete vice, unrelieved by anything of human feeling. ..."].
Some other critics have been neither more friendly than Sir
Walter, nor more discriminating, in speaking of Jonathan Wild and
Smollett's Count Fathom in the same breath, as if they were
similar either in purpose or in merit. Fathom is a romantic
picaresque novel, with a possibly edifying, but most unnatural
reformation of the villainous hero at the last; Jonathan Wild is a
pretty consistent picaresque satire, in which the hero ends where
Fathom by all rights should have ended,--on the gallows. Fathom is
the weakest of all its author's novels; Jonathan Wild is not
properly one of Fielding's novels at all, but a work only a little
below them. For below them I cannot help thinking it, in spite of
the opinion of a critic of taste and judgment so excellent as
Professor Saintsbury's. When this gentleman, in his introduction
to Jonathan Wild, in a recent English edition of Fielding's works,
says that: "Fielding has written no greater book," he seems to me
to give excessive praise to a work of such great merit that only
its deserved praise is ample.

A great satire, I should say, is never the equal of a great novel.
In the introductions which I have already written, in trying to
show what a great novel is, I have said that an essential part of
such a book is the reality of its scenes and characters. Now
scenes and characters will not seem real, unless there is in them
the right blend of pleasure and pain, of good and bad; for life is